Realistic Skies?

Any tips on how to make a sky?
I always used solid colors in the “World” tab, but now I’m lookin’ to make something more… realistic.

Any help would be appreciated,
Thanks!

Skybox, skydome …

As say monster, you can use a skybo or a skydome. If you want moving clouds, use a skydome that have not clouds in the image, and have the clouds in a separate mesh, to animate it you can use a animated texture or just a single texture in use nodes with a python script for move the texture (not the mesh).

This is my setup:

4 lamps: A sun lamp with shadows, and other 3 hemi lamps to do the ambient light (one is blue, and the other 2 lamps are just white).
Clouds: 2 half spheres with nodes that use the object color as vector for the image, and a python script that change the object color values.
Skybox: just a cube with the martinsh’s sky shader.

But if you want a day/night cycle you dont need a sky shader, you can use just spheres with gradient textures(like minecraft), or just use a ordinary skybox/skydome, and change the darkness of it.

Hmm, that’s a nice lookin’ sky.
Wasn’t panning on doing the moving clouds, but now I may consider it.

Thanks for the lamps setup, though I’m probably gonna skip GLSL, my computer (which is actually a laptop) isn’t too great. No shadows for me :[

Thanks for the example, Carlo!

It has trouble running MineCraft on the lowest setting…
and according to GTA 4, my memory usage was ~250MB (which I assume is the RAM)
The mods made playing through the lag bearable, though.

But the thing that gets to me when using GLSL is when I hit “UNDO”.
The delay time… it takes like, 3-5 seconds to undo something.

That’s graphics memory (vram) not ram. You should be able to run shadows if you could run gta 4. Just make sure the buffer size is low and that it follows the player with a vertex parent.

For lag in viewport, try putting different objects on different layers then only view the ones you need while editing.

Sent from my Galaxy Nexus using Tapatalk

The method turned out great!

Got the texture from this site, pretty handy24 free SkyDome game textures. 1024 x 1024 pngs: page 2


…now I just need to learn how to make a good-looking tree

You can use some sky textures too or even hdri map in low-res

make giant sphere
cut in half to semicircle
invert normal to inside
set backface culling
unwrap and texture use a specific type of texturing, forgot what it’s called, set background