New add-ons for Dynamic Sky

- [Instructor] Let's say you wanted a sky, but you didn't have enough time to make a good HGRI. Or maybe you didn't have one at all. What would you do? Well, in Blender you have two options to light your scene with a world. And the first is sky texture and the second is dynamic sky. And in today's Blender Tips, Tricks and Techniques, we're going to go over both. First, let's make a really interesting scene. So, let's switch to cycles. Get rid of this cube. Let's add a plane. And let's see here. Let's open this up, we're going to make it pretty big.

Tab and Edit mode W, subdivide. And let's subdivide this a few times. Maybe one more time. Let's pick a few of these. Turn on proportional editing. Hit G, and use your page up and down keys. You can kind of construct a nice little hill here. Here we go. Hit Enter. Tab, go to Shading, Smooth. Finally, Modifier, Subdivision, Surface.

There we go, and you get a nice little hill looking thing here, and you can, of course, play with it a little bit more, if you want to. Now let's add a monkey, Shift + A, add a monkey. And move the monkey into position, G, R and S. Any one of those can help you place the monkey correctly. That way she looks nice and happy. And same thing, Subdivision, Modifier and Shading, Smooth. Now if you look through camera view, oops, it seems our monkey's a little out of the way, so let's make sure she's right there.

There we go. Now if you look through camera view, or you can go to View, Camera. You can get a sense of what the scene looks like. We need two materials. The first I'll make is a pinkish monkey. If you want you can click left drag the viewport color over here. And let's make a new material, let's make this one kind of grassy greenish. That looks pretty good. Click and drag to viewport color.

Now, if you go to Rendered mode, you can see what you get. And hey, this looks pretty decent. There's a light back there, there's pink monkey, and this grassy looking hill. Okay, now what if you wanted to really punch this scene up? So let's add a World. Click on World, click on Use Nodes, click on Color and go to Sky Texture. And this is going to make a simple little sky for us to play with. Now it's really basic. You have this top-down view of the entire world.

So right now the whiteness in the middle implies that the sun is at high noon. If I were to drag it to the edge, it would imply that the sun is starting to set, and you can kind of see what's happening, things get a little orangey. You can play a little bit with the Turbidity. The Albeda level on the ground, which is basically the color of the ground, and the strength. So now you have a really strong sun off into the distance. That looks pretty good. Okay, so now let's go back to camera view. And let's try Dynamic Sky.

First I'm going to get out of Rendered mode, File, User Preferences, Add-ons, type in D-Y-N, dynamic. You'll see it's the second option. Turn it on, Save. Close this out. And under your T, for Tools, click on Create. Now come back to the World, and you'll see a new Dynamic one. Now at first, when you set this up, you're probably wondering, hey, what's going on.

Where's your sky. You don't really see anything. Well, if you hit N, you scroll down, you can go to Display, World Background, and look up and you can see you have a new sky generated for you. You can go back to the old world, and you don't really see it, but in this new dynamic sky you will see the sky. And in fact if we just go to camera view and do nothing else, and go to Rendered mode, it'll look pretty cool. Now look at that.

You have this really vibrant, rich image. You have the light coming right from above, and things feel pretty good. And just like in the sky texture, you can drag this and kind of imply a sunset kind of look. However, because this is a little different, you're going to have to tell the sun what color you want it to be. So let's make things a little bit more sunsetty, shall we? So first, we have to set our sun control. So let's set this color to something a bit more orangey.

And then let's go to our sky color. Let's play with this a little bit. And next, horizon color. I want this to feel kind of nice and cool. And finally, cloud color. I love how sunsets have some super rich reds, so I'm going to go something red. And now if you look at our scene, it looks like our monkey is out at sunset. And it looks awesome. And in fact, I can rotate the camera and get a really good view of everything. And just like everything in Blender, there's a million options to manipulate, like Soft hard, which will let you control the shadows on the ground and make them feel a little softer.

I highly recommend you play with dynamic sky and the sky texture and see what amazing skies you can come up with. And using this in your renders are going to make all of your images pop and feel a lot stronger. Until next time, this is David from Blenders Tips, Tricks and Techniques.