3DS Max Exercise 6.1 - Skydome

Skydome (Photos-public-domain.com, 2015)

Following the exercise I have created a skydome using textures from the VLE. This has been useful as this will be an important part of my exterior scenes.

After creating the hemisphere I scaled it down to be squished vertically. This will create a more realistic sky as the curvature will not be so obvious.

According to the exercise, it is best practice to use the 'xForm' modifier for this as it provides more flexibility. Presumably, this is best practice as it keeps the scale of the model itself uniform (100 on all axis by standard).

After applying the sky panorama texture to the texture it became apparent that the mapping was not correct, particularly on the bottom face. This will not be an issue in my scene as the terrain is a separate plane.

I fixed the issue by detaching the bottom face as a separate object. This meant I could use two separate UV maps to better fit the separate parts. The hemisphere works best with a spherical map while the flat circle face requires a flat planar projection. The result of this is shown below, with grass applied to the plane.

Good parts:

• Separate textures with own uv map means they are both high quality and can be projected correctly
• Using a UV map also allowed me to turn up the tiling and increase the quality
• Squishing the height map for a more realistic skydome will be a useful technique to carry over to my actual scene

Improvements: 

• The whole skydome can't be seen without proper lighting, the exercise is only using the default scene lighting