I want to render outdoor scenes. How do I set up a sky dome and get the proper lighting?

What version of Poser?

Poser 11 Pro

One way is to use an environmental sphere ... (The best is bagginsbill's envirosphere

He has a wonderful tutorial on his site as well ... You can use the lighting with the sphere ... and choose whether or not to add a sunlight as well, but there is a sun setting with bb's set-up. So, that may not be necessary.

You will need a ground plane and a transmap and texture map for PP11, since at the moment it does not incorporate a shadow catcher.

this one is a combination of Bagginsbill's sky dome, Hameleon's Horizon (here at Rendo) and 1 infinite light placed where the sun is in the sky image.

Nom!

The render ain't bad, either. :D

Wow ghostship!! That's exactly what I want to achieve! Did you use EZSkin3 for the character?

acrionx posted at 7:49PM Wed, 24 August 2016 - #4281011

Wow ghostship!! That's exactly what I want to achieve! Did you use EZSkin3 for the character?

No, I used my own PBR/Cycles SS skin shader. The new plugin for Ezskin3 works very well and looks a bit better than mine. He really did a great job on it.

Was that rendered in Superfly?

here is the shader I made and used for the ground, swim suit, and pearls. This is a physically accurate cycles shader for Superfly.

http://www.sharecg.com/v/85799/browse/7/Material-and-Shader/Poser-11-Superfly-Dielectric-Shader-version-2

Thank you! How long did that take to render?

freemarlie posted at 8:08PM Wed, 24 August 2016 - #4281018

Thank you! How long did that take to render?

a couple of hours because I ain't got a fancy computer or video card for GPU rendering.

to answer your original question: The best thing for the sky dome is an actual HDR image. These are 32bit images not the normal 8 bit we use for jpgs. You can use old 8 bit images but they do not give you the same level of contrast on the figure that the 32 bit HDR's do. Here is a link to a bunch of free ones that are pretty good.

http://www.hdrlabs.com/sibl/archive.html

Thanks!

That's a great resource Ghostship2. I'm still looking for some good (free) night skies. Having trouble tracking them down. Any ideas?

CGskies.com has some night skies.

http://cgskies.com/browse.php?type=night

there are a few here

http://noemotionhdrs.net/index.html

Thank you both for pointing those out. I'm gonna give them a try.