changing gears

So while I was working on my skydome I got a bit sidetracked by snow and moss shaders on trees and rocks. I started with the moss and since moss mostly grows on the north side of the of objects in the northern hemisphere I wanted the shader to be able to only be active on one side of the mesh that being the side I specified as north.

The second thing I wanted to be able to do is control the growth of the moss.

Moving on from that I wanted to be able to quickly add snow but I also wanted to be able to show a slow build of snow.

Lastly I wanted to be able to show a slight build up of snow when there was a lot of wind so I created a shader in which i can determine where wind is coming from and that is the direction that the snow will build up on.

Thanks for reading and have a good day.

More Skydomes

In the Past few days, that I've been working on my sky dome I've run into a number of problems. First of all the simple rotating sky dome didn't quite look right  

I then showed this to Josh Taylor my MA tutor and he suggested going back to basics and also using panning rather then rotating clouds which might give a more natural feel to it. He also suggested I use two sky domes the outer one being to show the moon,stars and higher clouds and then a second one slightly lower to show more clouds and get a good variation by slightly altering the direction. I first decided to see if I can make the clouds work with a panner since the stretching on the outer edges would be quite significant. I also tried to use two sky domes which did improve the clouds when looking straight up. The initial result was this:

After thinking about the dome a bit more and literally going back to the basics that being the shape of the dome I decided to try a disk similar to a saucer. The initial result looks promising so far but needs a lot of work.

Thanks for reading and have a good day.

Dynamic Clouds

So I've been working on the Skydome for a about a week now and have been stuck on the dynamic clouds for most of it. The reason for this is, that I need varying kinds of clouds to really get a dynamic feel to the scene. I will need normal puffy clouds on a sunny day, light cloud cover, full cloud cover and storm clouds and getting that is quite difficult. I've been trying to analyze the procedural Skydome in the Unreal Engine 3 which has been difficult at best. I think the best way to go about it is to create a simplistic Skydome that works and then slowly build on it with what I know works with my limited knowledge.

As a final thought I want the Skydome to have the possibility of working on an Alien planet so I'll start with a realistic and then build on top with alien aspects.