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-

Tags:Voyager, QTVR, Environment 360, Tip, Advanced

Here are some examples of what Bump Map (one of the options for the AM extra outputs) is capable of.

Normal-Test-D
Normal-Test-K
Normal-Test-K3
Normal-Test-K5

Download Normal Test K5 (Voyager bundle file)


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Tags:Tip, Bump Map, Voyager, Test

Voyager 1.6 has improved atmospheric models. One good example is the way the sun interacts with the haze. Select "extra bright sun" or "stronger halo,fuzzy sun" from the sun menu.
Set the sun very low and increase the haze level.

Tags:Voyager, Tip