hi, ive started doing the tutorials and such on various websites and on sidefx tutorial site… and well frankly I want to render outdoor environments like landscapes. I am curious to know how would i go about doing this in houdini, mainly the SKY … ppl have discussed biospheres but i am unable to find them. Either way i would like to make a light object (moon) in an empty sky. it seems simple enough but i am so confused with houdini its not funny. I am thinking to trying vue d'esprit for this instead… Thanks anyway~

- lc

Well, the “biosphere” is just a sphere with texture map applied on. As far as I understand it. So you might have something looking like this in your SOP network:

Sphere SOP
|
UV Texture SOP (to create UVs)
|
Shader SOP (There you use the shader from SHOP network to which it contain your textures)

Have you gone through the video tutorials? it might be helpful if you go through those first.

Cheers,
Alex

thanks, ive gone through most of the video tutorials. Theres a few i havent gotten the chance to do but for this case, how do i make it appear that its the sky? i place a camera inside of the sphere?? im so confused how 3dspace works. I did the global light tutorial in the help and found that was pretty cool, but.. didnt help the SKY lol… By the way, in teh video tutorials, they tend to start off with a Houdini logo with a sky background and a plane. is that sky background an image or is it dynamic.

Placing a cam inside a textured sphere is probably your best bet for sky, especially if the cam will be rorating 360. You can get really fancy and create moving clouds procedurally with VOPs, for example– more advanced stuff. But for starts, a sky texture would do. I have gotten good results by painting clouds in 2D apps like photoshop or painter and saving the images as alpha tiffs (transparencies preserved). Then in SHOP you can use the painted clouds (turning on diffuse and alpha options) in VEX layered surface shader to be applied to geometry at SOP level.

For instance you can create one large sphere with a gradient shader applied (whatever colors), then inside that create a slightly smaller sphere and apply your cloud alphas (you can have multiple cloud spheres, one inside another). Then using a simple expression in Rotate parameters (ie. $F/10) to have the spheres rotate around an axis at different rates. This would create an illusion of moving and swirling clouds, poor man's version. Now you can stick a cam at the center of the spheres and voila…sky with moving clouds.

Hope it makes sense.