A way to use a Poser sky dome with Daylight settings Tweet

[wimvdb]

Want to use the sky dome because of textures and still keep using the daylight environment?
Here is a trick which works most of the time: Divide up your sky dome in 2 or more material groups and make the section which is blocking the sun transparent
This will not work if the sun is in direct view, but will work in most other cases.

Here is a way to do it in Poser (You can probably do it in any modeler or UV mapping program). I divided it up in 4 sections (NW,NE,SE,SW)

Load your sky dome in scene and select the dome
Enter the group editor
Create a new group
Use the top camera and select one quarter of the sphere and add it to the group and give the group a new material name (NW)
Do this for every part of the dome and give it a different name (material and group). You can use the group editor functions to add and subtract previous selection or mirror selections.
Once you have done this, leave the group editor
You now have a modified dome. Give each of the new material zones the same material as the original in the material room
Now you will have in Poser the same sky dome as before in preview and in render
In the Octane plugin you can now select the material zone which is blocking the sun and make it transparent. It will now not block the sun.
Depending on the sky you should adjust the material. I often use diffuse and used the texture as an emitter

The advantage if doing this over using a simple background plane is that the dome is still present in most camera directions and you do not need to adjust the background plane to compensate for the angle.

Of course there are other solutions, but I like this one since I can keep using same sky dome for both Poser and Octane

Attached picture is an example of how it would look. Used the glasseye sky dome (sharecg) with one of his addon textures. I set the sun low and changed to red sky and red sunset

[face_off]

Great workflow. Thanks Wim.

Paul