True Sky 2.x was arguably the best Blender addon for creating your own skies. It didn't give you the high detail or complexity of a well-chosen HDRI, but it could generate an animation-ready living sky with a full day/night cycle and some cool volumetrics for fog and atmospherics.
It was fast and flexible, but it lacked a few things, such as more complex multi-layered clouds or a robust way to export an HDRI from its output. From today, those limitations are gone. As its strapline claims, the sky is no longer the limit.
True Sky 3
A quick tour of True-VFX's new addon.
Uninstall True Sky 2 before installing True Sky 3; running them together isn't currently supported.
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| True Sky 3 tab |
True Sky 3's many functions are arranged in 5 tabs, along with the ever-present Miscellaneous and Help & Documentation panels.
Luminous
Add Light sources (the sun and local stars) to your scene.1. Select Setup TrueSKY Scene.
2. Select from Earth (Default), or Moon.
If you enable Rendered viewport and set up your camera, you'll see that your scene now includes a ground plane (it's not a plane, its a whole darn world!) There's also the sun (Luminous Body 1) and a moon (Celestial Body 1)
Active Body Settings
Elevation: Vertical position in the sky in degrees above the horizon.
Rotation: Horizontal position in the sky
Limb Darkening: Darken the edge of the body
Click the eyedropper to manually set the sun's position in the frame.
Click the Sun icon to open a sun position menu for advanced settings.
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| Sunglasses on! (Exposure set to -2.50 |
Primary
Height: The height of the top of the atmosphere (default Earth value is 100000m (100km)
Shader Settings
The overall density modifier for Rayleigh scattering. Higher for stronger blue and a deeper aerial perspective. You can further modify X/Y/Z parameters that control the per-channel Rayleigh scattering coefficients. Values from 0 to 1 offer a subtle tint rather than a colour value.
- Blue sky: During the day, the shorter blue and violet wavelengths of sunlight are scattered much more than the longer red wavelengths. This scattered blue light fills the sky, and because the human eye is more sensitive to blue than violet, the sky appears blue.
- Sunsets and sunrises: When the sun is low on the horizon, sunlight must travel through more of the atmosphere to reach you. Most of the blue light is scattered away, allowing the longer, less-scattered red and orange light to dominate, creating colourful sunsets and sunrises.
Aerosols
The overall density modifier for Mie scattering. Mie scattering occurs when light interacts with a mixture of tiny particles (liquid or solid) suspended in a gas, such as water droplets in air. Higher for stronger halos and shafts. You can further modify X/Y/Z parameters that control the per-channel Mie scattering coefficients. Values increase the tint in haze.
Ozone
The overall density multiplier for ozone absorption. Higher for more banding effects in the atmosphere. You can further modify X/Y/Z parameters that control the per-channel Mie scattering coefficients. Values increase the tint in haze.Ozone absorption is a key factor in sky rendering, especially at sunrise and sunset, where it influences sky colour by preferentially absorbing longer wavelengths of light. While Rayleigh scattering dominates daytime sky colour, ozone's absorption in its Chappuis bands significantly deepens the blue of twilight and twilight zenith skies. It can also contribute to the red colours at sunrise and sunset. In rendering engines, this is modelled by including ozone absorption coefficients in the equation for atmospheric light extinction.
Artistic Values
Sun Glare: Width of the Mie scattering lobe. 0= No sun disk 1= Wide sun disk
Sky Anisotropy: Higher makes the aerosol density fall off more slowly with altitude.
Atmosphere Range: Control over Rayleigh fall off. 0 = steep fall off 1 = slow fall off keeping blue sky scattering visible at altitude.
Exponential Fog
This simulation of fog is more realistic than a linear implementation. Higher = thinker ground fog and stronger shafts.
Density: Overall density
Anistrophy: Henyey-Greenstein phase "g" for the fog. Negative value = more backscattering; positive value = more forward scattering. Higher positive values for increased god-ray contrast.
Fog Range: Vertical decay range for fog. 0= Rapid decay, 1=slower decay with fog extending higher. Good for when you are doing renders from within the sky and want more sky above you.
Surface
The ground layer. Turn it on or off. It's on by default to give you a satisfying ground without needing to bring in your own terrain mesh.
Radius: Default 6371000 m
Resolution: 256
Quality Multiplier: Increase the Earth's quality. Be careful out there. I got two hard crashes from increasing the quality of the Earth.
Cutout: Creates an opening in the world to be occupied by your own terrain. Set the radius of the cutout.
Location
City Search: Enter a city name to move the camera to that location on the globe.
Latitude: Latitude of the location.
Longitude: Longitude of the location.
I went to Kathmandu and was rewarded with this stunning view of the Himalayas.
Unfortunately, pumping the world quality up resulted in two rather horrible system crashes, the "Your system has encountered a problem and will restart" type. Hey, user, leave that world alone!
Adaptive Subdivision
Use adaptive subdivision on the primary (world). On by default.
Percentage of Radius: Percentage of the radius of the globe to subdivide.
Falloff Factor: Threshold of the base and full subdivision.
Max Subdivision: The maximum amount of subdivision within the region.
Iterations: The number of levels of subdivision from the distance to the edge of the falloff.
Displacement
Displacement on the globe. On by default.
Minimum and maximum height values for terrain.
Multiplier: Use this to exaggerate terrain displacement.
Flattening
Use these settings to not use displacement in a region. You can use this to create a gap for your own terrain, or if the area is obscuring something that you want in shot.
Offset UV Seam.
Use this parameter to hide the UV seam, since the primary is not a perfect sphere and may exhibit artefacts.
Aurora
Very cool, but niche. I'll cover these in a separate space-themed entry, along with Rings, Celestial and Space. |
| Coming soon! |
Clouds
The clouds section is where True Sky 3 offers a highly requested improvement over the previous version. Multiple cloud layers!
You can add 3+ cloud layers. Right now, these are still being worked on, but the release version comes with Cumulus-type layers. These are the cotton wool heaps that are generally visible below 2000m.
To add a cloud layer, Click the +.
Volume Density: The density of the cloud volume. Higher for more dense volume.
Altitude: The altitude of the cloud layer.
Enhanced Godrays
Enable this feature to make the shafts of light that break through the clouds more intense. This is a visual hack that changes cloud density to help highlight rays.Rainbow Effect
Its proper name is cloud iridescence. It's a diffraction phenomenon that happens when sunlight interacts with small water droplets or ice crystals in thin, semi-transparent clouds. It can be very pretty.
Rainbow Coverage: How widely the effect appears.
Rainbow Density: How intense the effect appears.
Shape
Cloud Coverage: Spreads the cloud out to cover more sky through seeding, where a cloud spreads out. Currently, this won't reach a complete overcast.Cloud Amount: This balloons the cloud formation, making it a bigger structure with more clouds.
Cloud Depth: Increases the cloud's height.
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| Example clouds #1 |
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| Example clouds #2 |
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| Example clouds #2 (above) close-up |
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