This is a quick tutorial on how to make sky backgrounds in 3D Studio MAX. As standard, MAX has the possibility to add environmental maps, meaning the move and roate as the camera moves and rotates. This is however not a very impressive effect, since making a background with this is very hard to look real. Very often, you get seems where them map’s borders meet, and the map also needs to be huge to not look fuzzy, unless you use some kind of tiling, which isn’t good for much more than star backgrounds. This tutorial will show you how to make skies in 3D Studio MAX that not only look good, they can also easily animated. You can make the clouds change shape, move, rotate, change size or almost anything you want. I will take a step back in technology however, since this technique does not work with environmental maps. For that reason, I will use a mesh for the clouds, the mesh being a large object.
The landscape
First of all, we need a landscape or something. If you haven’t already done so, read the landscape tutorial I wrote, available on this site. Here is the landscape I made:
It doesn’t have to be very detailed for this tutorial. I used 50×50 steps in the box.
The background
The background also needs a colour. This colour should be the SKY colour, not the cloud colour. I use a light blue colour here:
Set the background colour in the Environment control box. You know where it is…….
The clouds
Of course, since this tutorial is about clouds, I should get around to that. Now we have a landscape and a sky colour. Now we need to add the clouds. First of all, we need a large dome. Make this by substracting (boolean……I know….) a large hemisphere (geosphere, check “Hemisphere”) from a slightly larger one:
The two hemispheres. Substract the smaller one from the largest.
A small note on this. When performing a boolean operation, you might get your mesh screwed up, so go to the Edit menu and click “Hold”, so you can get it back if it get’s hairy. Now we need the clouds themselves. We make those in material editor. Pick one of the standard materials, and turn Shin. Strength to zero. You can also set some self illumination. I use 100 fir this tutorial. You don’t have to bother with the colours for this but you can if you want. In the Diffuse slot, put a Noise map. The noise will be the clouds. Enter the values in the screenshot below:
Enter these values.
Make sure you have coordinate type UVW checked. Also, set the tiling to 2 and 8, and leave the last one at 1. The noise size should be 0.1. These values are of course just an example, so use the values you find useful. Now……copy the Noise map into the Opacity slot, and make sure you copy it as an instance. This way, the black areas in the noise will be transparent, so we can see the blue colour we behind. You’re probably wondering why I’m not using blue instead of black and skip the opacity alltogether. I will explain that later. Now apply the material to the dome. Also, add mapping coordinates to the dome. Use spherical mapping, and move the gizmo so the top of it sits right on top of the dome. Now we can render a test:
A nice sky.
And there is the map itself. Now we should take a look at animaition. As you know, animation in MAX is easy. You just turn on animation and do the changes you want. In this case, we should mess with the material itself. You can animate almost any parametre in MAX, including the parameters for the noise here. Let’s take a look at the parametres again:
The parametres for the noise.
Offset: will move the noise along the specified axis. Tiling: will specify the repetition of the noise. Angle: will rotate the noise around the specified axis. Size: the noise size. Phase: course of animation. As you can see, a lot of parametres define the noise. When we also know that we can animate any of them in MAX, we have endless possibilities. Phase will change the look of the noise, while the coordinates will change the position of it. Play around with these parametres to see what they do. Now you have the material for it at least. I said I would explain why I used opacity instead of just a blue/white noise. That would work too, but you will also be a bit limited. When using opacity, you have the possibility of adding several layers of clouds, just by adding more domes. You can also use gradients on the outer dome to make a sunset or whatever you want. With a blue/white noise, this would be difficult. Anyway, now you have the start of it. Do some experimenting to see what you can make of it.
