Environment 360

The Alien/SciFi Skies Set is out now!

I am very pleased to announce the release of the Alien/SciFi Skies Set for Artmatic Voyager.

You can find all the relevant informations here

Cheers,

Dick
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Alien/Scifi Skies Gallery

I am almost done with the Alien/SciFi skies collection. Some of you might be curious to see what the skies look like. I have just set up a gallery so you can view each and every sky of the collection. The pictures are renders from the Voyager scene files included in the set. So the RGB surfaces used for in the renders are also part of the set.

Enjoy!

-Alien/SciFi Skies gallery-
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SciFi Sky

The UFO is from Eric...

A-21b-Ufo2
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Surreal Construct

Here is another QTVR movie file. For the surface I used one of Eric`s very cool city files.

The sky is a 360 environment. The technique used here makes it possible to have objects that span the entire sky. The construct in this example seamlessly surrounds the city. It`s a candidate for the Alien/SciFi sky collection...

-Surreal Construct-
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QTVR Movie:Snowy Mountains

Here is a QTVR movie (Panoramic view of a picture) named Snowy Mountain. The clouds sky is a newly developed seamless 360 Environment. What`s cool about this approach is that you can not only add Voyager clouds to it, but also that this enables you to add any other elements to the sky, like planets, moons, suns, sunbeams etc.

Another interesting aspect is the
RGB Surface file. The snow, instead of taken from Voyager, is provided by the AM file.
The fact that the snow is generated by the AM file rather than directy by Voyager gives you more flexibilty.

1. You can make the snow appear where you like. It does not have to be altitude/slope dependent.
2. You probably noticed that Voyager snow, when used on edgy surfaces, is not smoothening out those areas. This tends to look unnatural.
When creating the snow with AM, all you have to do is make those areas, where the is supposed to be snow, look smooth (which is quite a challenge though).

As for the
RGB Surface I made use of the newly added extra output option "Normal", which adds a bump map to the rock texture. The really tricky thing was to get the snow to appear only on shallow slopes AND to have no bump map applied to it, while having the rock texture on steep slopes with bump mapping.
As those techniques/features have great potential you will probably hear and see a lot about them.

See the QTVR movie -
Snowy Mountains-
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