No Skydome & Lights

Appart from the exercises some weeks ago, I have not been talking again about lightning or adding a skydome in the final animation. This has a very simple explanation: There are no lights or skydomes in the animation. This is not something I did out of laziness and here are the reasons why I decided not to use any of them.


This is a bit of a boring post but I think it is important to understand why I did not include lights or an skydome in the animation.


Why no Lights?


All started with the first animations I rendered. Obviously this test animations only included the essential for the animation to happen (the camera, the animated objects and the terrain). Once I was happy with the rendered scene I started adding the rest of the things such as static objects like trees, rocks and grass (which if watched carefully they are also animated since they move to simulate the wind), lights (spotlights and omni-lights), snow and a Skydome.


For the kind of animation I created (quick camera changes, objects moving very quick and considerably high) I could see almost no difference, lightning wise, with the test animations (apart from longer rendering times) and that is why I decided to not to include lights in the animation. Note that the light effect on the turret, the antenna and the cockpit are Lense Effects > Glow and no lights.


Why no Skydome?


The reason for the Skydome not being included is a bit different as I could clearly see the difference between skydome and dark empty space in the result animations. The main reason that made me take the decision of not including an skydome is the texture confusion between the objects and the skydome, and this is when the borders of the objects (the spaceships in this case) are not completely clear because of the background texture (the skydome). I'll put an example to explain it a bit better:


If the camera position made the object's background the terrain (with a snow texture) the object was clearly visible but if the camera make the object's background the Skydome the object, specially its edges, were not that clear. In an animation where a camera angle does not last for more than 3 seconds and where the object move very fast, this edge problem can cause the watcher not seeing in time some of the objects in certain scenes.


Now you might ask to yourself: so, if both the terrain and the skydome have a texture applied to them, why did the terrain gave me no trouble? The answer again is quite simple: The terrain texture is homogeneous (all the same with little variations) which allowed me to TILE the texture by 10 and MIRROR the tiles. This made the texture "particle size", or pixels to be 10 times smaller than the spaceship's texture therefore the edges were properly visible.
However, because the Skydome texture have parts of clouds and parts of sky in it I was not able to TILE it without getting a terrible result. And because the texture image of both the skydome and the ships are the same size (about 2 mega pixels) but the ships are much smaller, the pixels of the skydome were considerably expanded which gave me trouble with the edges of the ships.


Then I added two elements to the animation that helped me with the decision of not adding an skydome. The first element was the snow particle effect which contrasted with the black emptiness of the sky very well and created a very nocturnal atmosphere. Also, because the white colour of the snow, the contrast against a black sky has a much better result than the contrast against a bluish colour sky.
The other element are the planets and the moon I added. They helped me to give the scenes a cooler look I think. I tried to keep them always the same size to try to avoid the fact that the spaceships are actually getting closer and closer. I did this simply scaling the planets down and moving them a bit further every time the spaceships advanced towards them.




In other words, I did not add an skydome or lights because I think the animation look better as it is.