Night sky

V-Ray V-Ray for 3ds Max General
1

Any chance the the Sky and Cloud features in the VRaySun will be modified to do night skies? Maybe even include a moon or stars? If not, does anyone know of good solutions with animatable clouds?

2

I was testing a bit but IPR crashed (twice when fiddling with some sun parameters). The size of the full moon and the sun are almost similar (as seen from earth) so you could leave it more or less the same (in the below render I made it a tad smaller though) but the intensity is about 1/400 000 of the sun (brightness of the moon). With some CC here and there you can kind of simulate a night sky (minus the stars). What I did was put a vraycolor (temperature mode around 10-15.000 color temp) on top of vraysky in a composite node (vraycolor in color blend mode).

As we still don’t have the cloud parameters in the vraysky map (or a way of specifying a sun node in the sky map with clouds on) I couldn’t come up with a solution of superimposing the clouds on top of a night sky/star map. I was testing this by combining a kind of star sky mask in the composite but I can’t mask out the clouds so the ‘stars’ appear on top of the clouds…

NIGHT.jpg
NIGHT.jpg1000×700 53.9 KB

3

If it is for a still image, you could render a 360 spherical of your sky, load it in photoshop to paint a black and white mask where the clouds are, then use that mask in a composite to overlay the clouds on top of the stars i guess. I used this kind of method to overlay parts of a spherical HDRI to get some environment from that blended on top of the “regular” vray sky so that i could control the clouds and fine tune the sun.

4

If it would be for a still you can just easily use a nighttime HDRI and be done with i​t, but he needed it animated.

NIGHT[0000-0015].gif

IPR keeps crashing when editing Sun Parameters. Another reason for me to stay away from using IPR.​

5

Well, if you report it as a bug, developers would have a chance to fix it so other users can profit from more stable software…

6

Well I mostly report the bugs I encounter, but sometimes it takes a bit of searching what is exactly is causing it and I didn’t have that much time on my hands. Either way, I think I know why: BUG: IPR Crashes / Freezes 3ds Max when changing sun size a couple of times - Chaos Forums​