Upgrading the Vray Sky

[rmaytee]

You'll love this.

I LOVE how the Vray Sky works, I mean LOVE IT! The only problem I have is the lack of clouds. About half the time I need to match an image that has coulds in the background. Replacing the Sky map with an hdri is okay, but the results don't usually look as good as the Sky map.

What if the sky had some cloud perameters:

__Enable Clouds

Cloud Type:
__Cumulus
__Stratus
__Cirrus
__Nimbus

Cloud Density:
__Overcast
__Cloudy
__Partly Cloudy
__Mostly Clear

I know I'm making this sound a lot easier than it is, but I've seen some pretty impressive stuff come out of Chaos. It won't shock me if you can pull this off. It may not work for animations, but for sure stills.

[Neilg]

You can use a panoramic still of some clouds in the vray comptex to overlay them with your vray sky.

[rmaytee]

What it the vray comtex?

[Neilg]

It's in your shaders section of the material editor - where you pick vray dirt / edgetex et al. Just adds photoshop like blending modes to two bitmaps, so you can use additive mode to get clouds overlayed over the sky while keeping the HDRI-like depth.
Takes a bit of tweaking to get good, but works very well.

Then all your controls you just asked for just depend on the type of photo you use to make the panoramic.

[rmaytee]

Just tried it. That's kind of cool. Using a mix shader worked even better for me. Who knows, maybe that will suffice.

[Neilg]

It's not the most elegant solution, but it works very well for what it does - I dont use the vray sky on its own now at all

[dellis]

I'd like to see a night time option in the VRay sky.

[Morne]

+1 on the night time option

[shkumbin]

I dont know how u guys are seting it up but I just tried it and it doesnt work for me. I have a physical cam. Im putting the defaultsky on 1st slot of comptex and an HDRI on the second and did ADD and it just shows the sky it doesnt show them both, I dont get it.
Anybody care to explain?
cheers

[palibebeh]

...

- option to choose between morning/sunset sky/sun.
what i mean is that atm vraysky's colour is computed based on the sun's relative position /angle above the horizon. but in reality light in the morning is different than the light in the evening - maybe in perfect conditions (no clouds, constant humidity etc) they are the same, but my observations suggest that in the morning the sun's light is colder, more towards red/pink and sky is cold blue, while at sunset the light is warmer - deep yellow/orange, sky is darker and deep blue (which gives a nice contrast between lit and shaded surfaces). furthermore sky is brighter before sunrise than after sunset.
but again - that's just me, i've seen much more sunsets that sunrises so my data can be incomplete


and of course - +1 for vraynightsky AND vraymoon

[Neilg]

I dont know how u guys are seting it up but I just tried it and it doesnt work for me. I have a physical cam. Im putting the defaultsky on 1st slot of comptex and an HDRI on the second and did ADD and it just shows the sky it doesnt show them both, I dont get it.
Anybody care to explain?
cheers

If youre using exposure correction you'll need to ramp up the values of your bitmap by a hell of a lot. A colour correct map will do the job, just push up the brightness/contrast alongside each other until it becomes visible.
I just dont bother with exposure and change the multipliers of the sun/sky to suit instead.

I'm not talking about a hdri here, a jpg will do. The sky is adding all the dynamic range you need, the second slot is just for detail and can be adjusted well enough with the brightness/contrast/gamma controls.

[shkumbin]

yea i tried it, it works, the only thing is that there is a lot of tweaking involved to get it working, so thats a bit of an issue, so yeah +1 for some kind of cloud system in the vraysky. I think it would be a big big help.
cheers

[Neilg]

If you dont use exposure control you pretty much just throw it straight in and it works.

[shkumbin]

u mean exposure control on vraycam?

[Neilg]

Yeah, thats the one. You need to adjust the intensity values of the vray sun instead to bring it down, but I find that simpler than bringing everything else in my scene up to match it.