Sky and clouds

[Glenn Massey]

I have used accurender 4 alot which had the automatic sky and clouds settings.

 

I am trying to show a sky with clouds as I am drawing a shinny aluminium roof and need to show the sky reflection on it.

 

I have no idea how to replicate this in AR5.

 

Can anybody help with this.

 

Glenn

[Roy Hirshkowitz]

My favorite option is to use a good quality hdri sky for both lighting and backgrounds.  Here's our page on hdr resources-- many others are available out there.  Do keep in mind that many of these are not calibrated to real-world values, so if you want to do something like combine them with direct sunlight or artificial lighting you may need to monkey around with their multipliers (hint-- lighting channels make this much easier and more interactive.)

 

Many other possibilities-- here are a few:

 

• Use the above process but composite the image with a background of your choice either using the alpha channel (recommended)-- or by selected a standard RGB image as a color background. Reflection will use the HDRI image in this case.
• Use analytical sky for lighting and an hdri for all your background channels (calibrate may be an issue.)
• If you've got a nice spherical RGB image you can convert that to HDRI using the widget provided (this doesn't work perfectly, but usually yields decent results.)

 

[Glenn Massey]

Thanks