So I tried making my own, and after a good bit of experimentation I've got something I'm fairly happy with and which other might like to play with.

Here's Stonemason's 'Streets of the Med' (plus a few other bits and pieces) in the morning.

Note that the only change for these renders was the position of the "Sun".

Anyway, here's the mat files (mt5) and instructions. (Knock the ".txt" off the end).

Enjoy! Feedback, suggestions etc. welcome.

EDIT: the zip file's too big. Bear with me while I sort something out....

Looks good!

Can't see the attachment though?

Always on the lookout for skydome textures.  I'll give these a try. Thanks.

they look very good.  use raytraced sun to get shadow edge blur. no blur on shadow edges next to the object casting the shadow, then the blur increases as the shadow edge gets farther away from the object.  bill did a cloud procedural for the sphere, but it has hundreds of nodes IIRC.

p.s. I just checked outside and the noon shadow edge had a blur width of ~1 cm at 1 m, ~3 cm at 3 m, but it may not be linear. hence it would only be obvious in relatively close shots.

Question: I included an effects shader that will turn ordinary day clouds into serious storm, sunset, etc. Did you:

1. Not think it was useful

or

1. Not even know about this shader

Original sky

BB, yes I've used the effects shader many times - what I'm trying to achieve is a method of generating my own cloud shapes / distributions / positions, rather than rely on stuff from flickr etc. 

The other thing I'm going to have a stab at is to whip out my DSLR and make some equirectangular HDR maps, when time permits.

Any pointers you might be willing to share on how you make those equirectangular HDR maps would be gratefully read, CSpear... I just purchased a Canon T3i and would love to give it something to do.

I use vue for making my skies. I just load an atmosphere then render with panorama and spherical set and HDRI and out it comes.

then i map it onto the BB envirsphere of course.

Hm, on Vue 10 Studio, I don't have a Panorama setting. I have Panavision and Ultra-Panavision: are these the same thing? And where is the spherical set? A lot of my setting appear to be disabled. :blink:

panoramic view under dpi setting - it's there

and check that little box underneith for spherical render.

Oh, got it - I was looking in the drop-down. Thanks, Esther.

also in vue if you use the panorama setting (without sherical renders) you can get some really nice vue renders by adjusting the angle.  

Quote - Any pointers you might be willing to share on how you make those equirectangular HDR maps would be gratefully read, CSpear... I just purchased a Canon T3i and would love to give it something to do.

RobynsVeil, I'll be using something called 'Stitcher' which is now part of the Autodesk stable, because that's what I have. It's a pig of a thing to use though - clunky, slow, idiosyncratic interface - it's main advantage being that it produces great results. And it's expensive.

There's an OpenSource thing called Hugin which might be worth a look. It'll do equirectangular HDR images according to the documentation but I haven't tried that.

Quote - BB, yes I've used the effects shader many times - what I'm trying to achieve is a method of generating my own cloud shapes / distributions / positions, rather than rely on stuff from flickr etc. 

I agree, equirectangular are nice, but we never found what we want.

Great job :D

Have installed Hugin in Ubuntu (painless). Reading the docs...

"Although Hugin is essentially a panorama stitcher, like other GUI front-ends it has a range of advanced features:

Among the Hugin workflow options, it is possible to correct exposure, Vignetting and White balance between photos; generate HDR, exposure fused or focus stacked output from bracketed photos; or use 16bit and HDR input data natively.

Photos can be digital or scanned, and taken with any kind of camera. A full range of lenses are supported, from simple cameraphones to obscure fisheye lenses. Hugin supports various output projections including a range of spherical, cartographic, and camera projections.

Hugin supports panoramas taken with multiple rows of photos, with or without bracketing. Bracketed photos can be handheld, taken using a DSLR bracketing function, or as consecutive panoramas shot at different EV exposure levels. Hugin can produce successful panoramas shot with cameras that always shoot using auto-exposure and auto-whitebalance."

...let you know how I go. It does support Python scripting, which is pretty cool. Thanks for the tip, CSpear.