Im trying to use a skydome but when i put it in my scene it comes out too dark, so u cant see any of the clouds or anything. Ive tried using radial lights but is there another way that wont mess of th lighting for the rest opf the scene? thanks-

in the materials thingy near the top of the screen is a drop down menu. click this and untick "Cast Shadows" and "Receive Shadows". this should work. the way i understand it is that it make the material sort of transparent without making transparent, if you understand me.... basically it only lets light through. i think... John

Higher ambience also helps in brightening the whole sky. As long as the sky-texture is on the ambient channel ofcoarse. Ranged falloff radials can take care of avoiding messed up lighting on the rest of the scene.

thanks---it looks alot better now, i shouldve thought of that earlier!

To quote AgentSmith in a long ago post... "This is a Bryce-ish trick to simulate the effects in higher end programs for photo-real reflections. All it is, is a giant sphere, the one I use is xyz=300.00, attributes set to positive. I then duplicate it, and make the second one xyz=299.00, attributes set to negative. Group the two spheres. Now you have a giant hollow ball to play in. Apply a picture to it. You will want to make the sphere slightly transparent so light will illuminate the picture, your scene and your reflections. Anything with a reflective surface inside the giant sphere will now reflect a real picture making it that much more realictic. Most of the time you may only need the sun for light, but anything is useable/possible. One problem though, if your reflective objects reflect really well, like those above you will need a pic for the giant sphere that is suited so that when you wrap it Spherically, it looks normal, and not pinched at the top and bottom. A couple pics in my gallery called "Black Glass Figment" use this whole set-up, but the reflections are just splashes of color, so it didn't matter that the giant sphere pic wasn't suited for spherical wrapping." and... "The sky had everything clicked off. Shadows are at 50, the "link sun to view" is not checked. Having the sun directly overhead will also work well with this, Azimuth=0, Altitude=90. Sun's rgb all=158. Ambient is white, sky dome is black." (Thanks AgentSmith) TMG

a lot of times you can also make a transparency map in photoshop to get only the clouds opaque

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/messages.ez?Form.ShowMessage=775196

For those interested... here is the link. TMG