The contents of the scene files described below and the objects they
reference are copyright 1994 by Infinity Heart Productions (IHP). They may
not be reproduced or distributed in any collection for which a fee of more
than $5.00 per disk, or $15 per CD-Rom is charged without the expressed
written consent of IHP. These files may be distributed via electronic mail
and BBS as long as no fees are charged for the file themselves, and the
entire set of files, including this text file remain together as a package.
You may use these commercially, as part of productions or production pieces
for which you are compensated as long as you do not sell the scene and
object files by themselves. If you find that these scenes have helped you
make a profit on a job that would have otherwise been smaller or harder to
earn without the file, you may want to either:
a) make an appropriate donation in the name of IHP to an organization that
supports World Peace though building interpersonal respect and understanding
between all members of the world family, rather than by political action
(e.g. Peace Runs International, AFS, Unicef....) and forward a note of that
donation to IHP,
OR
b) make what you feel is an appropriate "Shareware" donation to IHP.
THE COMPANY
Infinity Heart Productions is based in Santa Barbara county, California and
is a Toaster based company that provides production, post-production,
animation and titling services to educational and industrial video producers
and corporations. IHP also provides Personal Video Production consulting
services. Customers have ranged from local camera and video supply houses
to Cine Award winning Idea Bank, and Peace Runs International with locations
as diverse as San Francisco, New York, Toronto, as well as Santa Barbara.
The company also supplies 3D objects to stock object collection brokers as
well as providing "made to order" models.
The company may be contacted at:
Infinity Heart Productions
537 Arundel Road
Goleta, CA 93117
(805) 964-9540
or Compuserve 76370,621
THE GOODS
To render the scenes, place the scene files in a location accessible to
Lightwave. Then copy the directory called Sky into the default Objects
location (usually the Toaster/3D/Objects sub-directory). Load the scene into
Lightwave and render away.
These first scene, EndlessSky.lwscn was actually used in a fixed camera
flying logo scene to create planes of clouds moving at a time-lapse pace.
The other two scene files were experiments made in response to a question in
the CIS AmigaVendor forum where someone needed a sky that would work with a
moving camera in a Lightwave scene. These are two scenes of nearly 100 that
were generated and tested over a two day period. I learned a lot about
skies that could be made just using a fractal noise transparency map, and
have included some information on what can be done by manipulating various
parameters of the fractal noise texture. These scenes are intended as
starting points for others to make nice skies, not as end products.
The first modification that would be appropriate would be to vastly increase
the size of the sky domes and the textures in equal proportions. Storm
skies could be made with concentric domes of different shades of grey with a
deep gray background color, for example. The the other parameters can be
manipulated to create different types of clouds, "close" skies, "big" skies,
or even, in combination with texture maps on the dome or background, sunset
skies. I found the possibilities endless, and the idea of a Lightwave sky
generator exciting to contemplate.
At any rate, try making modifications one at a time to learn how each factor
changes the sky. Render a few seconds of animation to get the feel for how
different velocity settings change the sky's evolution.
NOTE: If all you need is a single frame of sky to use as a background image, and you do not like "frame 0", just render a different frame as there is texture velocity in each scene, or move the texture coordinates until you get a pattern that works for you.
The Scene files:
EndlessSky.lwscn -
This is a portion of a scene I did for a flying logo sequence. This scene
has two planes of "sky", one above and one below the space in which the
logos were to fly. The two planes almost touch at the vanishing point and
each blends into the background sky color at that point so no seams or plane
edges are visible. The EndlessSky.lwscn frames were saved and used as a
background sequence behind the flying logos. This approach of compositing
two animations actually rendered more quickly than had I combined all the
elements into a single animation. (Note that I rotated the final scene
rather quickly with a reflection map selected for the logo surfaces to get
motion highlights across the logo in order to 'fake' the reflection and
passage from sun to shade due to the passing clouds.)
SkyDome.lwscn -
This is a white luminous hemispherical dome with a transparency map on the
dome which allows the blue background to show through. To create a less open
sky, lower the percentage in the transparency map texture value requester.
To show more sky, set the fall-off values to 0. The fall-off values as set
are a compromise between making the clouds fade into "horizon haze" and the
openness of the sky. The contrast should be lowered to eliminate hot spots
in the clouds if the sky is viewed at a higher inclination. The texture
velocity is set for a "Time-Lapse" type look. Slow it down for a more
realistic transformation. The 'y' component is roughly a control of the
change in "boil" of the cloud, whereas x and z components are translational
in appearance with respect to the camera. The texture dimensions give a
stratocumulus look to the clouds. Making x and z differ by a factor of 2 or
3 can give the look of broken stratus clouds. Keeping them both small and
roughly equal will give a cirrus look (for instance, cut the dimensions to
around 80, 30, 60) and increase fall-off to bring up the horizon fade if
there is a nothing to cover the sky/ground meeting place at the far horizon.
Note that the camera in this scene is a little too 'wide angle' for my
taste. Just increasing the overall size of the dome and increasing the size
of the texture a little less would solve this problem.
SkyDome3.lwscn -
This scene controls cloud shape by flattening the dome so that, instead of
an hemisphere, the dome has a more elliptical shape to it. This allows the
camera to be less wide angle, and gives the impression of a more expansive
sky. The velocity on this texture is more in line with a blown prairie sky.
Just flattening the dome without changing any other parameters from
SkyDome.lwscn resulted in a sky that had very flat streaming clouds like
those often seen over mountain passes in high wind conditions (i.e. very
drawn out lenticular clouds). I called it the Montana Big Sky look.
However, I went on to tweak the values to end up with more of a 'thin
scattered' look. In order to keep some turbulent detail in the clouds, the
number of sources in the fractal noise maker had to be set to 10.
EPILOGUE
Enjoy playing with these scenes. If you derive any particularly neat scenes
from them, we'd be very interested in seeing them. If you have any custom
modelling or scenes you'd like created, we would be interested in providing
