:more clouds

These various cloud formations were made using Terragen 2. The strategy is to render out a cubic projection (6 renders) of the environment and export to HDRshop to setup an HDRImage for use with a final gather pass. Each of these took about 4 hours to render and probably will never be animated. They'll work great as background mattes after some color correction. The attraction of these renders is the amount of realistic detail and atmospheric effects that I can get. Hopefully I only need to render out one pass (6 renders) for the entire scene. These in addition to the animated Maya clouds should make for a nice cloud sky environment.

Nice thing about terragen is that it can natively export .EXR which is becoming a favorite next to digital photo .RAW images. Terragen 2 took about a week to figure out how to use after copious readings up on the Terragen forums. The software is still in preview so the UI is somewhat barebones.

I plan to be tweaking the production sky renders (on the side) at least for another month or so before I will settle on something.