Subtitles of the Movie

So, this is the same Terrain I've been working on, but if we do a little Area Render right here we'll notice that well, gosh, there's no sky. It looks like space. In fact if this was gray instead of the Desert Landscape that I dropped onto it in the last movie it could be space for all we know. Well, let's look at how we put a realistic sky into our scene and show you where you find those. If you've been following the movies all the way through we've actually done this in a couple of others, but we're going to look at some of the detailed features of that now. To get to the Realistic Sky Editor you come up to your Scene Settings, and those can be found in the lower right-hand portion of your Properties Tray. If you click the word Scene, you're given options that relate specifically to your scene, and one of those is Atmosphere. Currently it says None. If you click and hold you're presented with some options: Cloudy Fog, Distant Fog, which are good for close-up types of things; there's Realistic Sky; and then there's one that's just called Sky. I never use Sky. It's actually a Legacy version of what has been improved significantly in Carrara to create realistic skies. If you chose this the options are rather crude and the sky is always almost a throw-back psychedelic blue. Realistic Sky however is the one we're going to select. With Realistic Sky selected we have some options for Cloud Animation, we've got some Horizon Altitude Ð and I always leave mine at zero except in very, very special circumstances Ð and Ground Color. You can turn that on or off, and let me show you what that does. I'm going to select my Terrain and Disable its visibility. Coming back to the Scene Settings, with Ground on, if I do an Area Render real quickly using the keyboard shortcut X, we'll see that the sky renders up and we can see some ground. If I Disable Enable Ground and do the same thing we'll get a render with a gray haze in the background and sometimes that's a little more desirable, especially if the horizon's creeping in because you're looking over a mountaintop or something, so know that that capability is there. Also hidden right up here in the top is a Preset button. You've got the ability to save whatever settings you've made if you want by doing the little Save icon, Save Component, you can load ones that you've already made, but the Presets is a nice way to take some shortcuts and get into some basic scenes much faster. Let's go ahead and choose something that looks like, oh, I don't know, how about some, a nice California Sky. Yeah. We'll choose that and go OK. When I do a quick Render now in my scene all the Atmospheric conditions have already been set, the Ground's been enabled, but let's open up the Editor and take a look at this. I'll click the Edit button and we're presented now with the ability to render in our scene, and actually let me Cancel this real quick, I'm going to turn on my Terrain, and one thing that we learned in the Lighting Section, I want to have sunlight imitate in my scene so I'm going to turn this light here into sunlight. I'll select it, come over to General, choose Distant Light, and convert this now to Sunlight, which means it's going to obey the Atmospheric Editor. I'll select Scene again from the Properties Tray, come back into Edit, and now when we render and we've got Auto Refresh set up I want it to render my scene and we can see, oh, I didn't turn the Landscape back on. Let me come back to Terrain, General, Visible. Now we'll select the scene and do this one more time. We'll Edit, and Render, and we'll see our scene basked in the glow of the sunlight that matches the environment around it. Very easy to work with. The Cloud Layers are self-explanatory. You enable them, they get their own controls for Thickness and Coverage, how you want to move them, what types of clouds they are. Likewise, there's General Atmosphere controls, and some Fog controls. You have to enable them with the checkbox to get those working. Do know that the more Cloud Layers you stack up the darker your scene gets. That's just the way Carrara happens to render that, and knowing that ahead of time won't make you scratch your head later on and go, what's going on? We learned in the Lighting Section that we can convert Sun and Moon and direct those around, so we visited this area a little bit, but something that I didn't point out that is kind of neat that we can do is the Advanced Sunlight Editor. If I click this you can actually enter a date, a year, a latitude and longitude and it will calculate the sun position for you. Awesome if you're trying to do some architectural renderings and you want to liken the environment to where the building actually is. A nice way to shortcut that so there's no guesswork, and your clients will appreciate that. I'm going to select Cancel for now. Let me show you how we can turn this into a super hyper realistic type of scene setting. I'm going to accept this and choose OK. In our Scene Settings we still have the ability to add a background, and this is something most folks don't know. Carrara ships with a couple of HDRI Maps, one's a Sky Map, but if you have access to more, and I happen to have a collection of them, you can actually put in an HDRI Map and it will show through the Realistic Sky Editor. So if I choose Sky number 3 here, I know you don't know what that looks like, but I do, and we happen to pop back into our Editor here, we'll see this render up in the Editor, but that HDRI Map has some clouds; they show up and actually the environment's brighter. The advantage to doing this is that it will also bring those super hot reflections onto reflective objects. Additionally, if you move the sun around the atmosphere overlays and affects how the HDRI Map looks, so it's a believable way to bring in super high-definition reflections into your Realistic Sky scene. If I was to accept this it would pop in a different map, one that's got more clouds in it, open that and do the same thing again, we'll see that we get a scene now that is populated with realistic clouds that match our scene. Those background elements do need to be spherical. They don't have to be HDRI, they can be a spherical, regular map. It's just a cool way to add some real skies in Carrara. In our next movie, or next Section, we'll actually start working with the Carrara Hair Modeler.