Render not giving me a blue sky in distance
nomad-ads_8ecd56922e
Posts: 1,960
Okay, maybe I'm doing this wrong. My understanding is that, if I have certain settings enabled, I'm supposed to have a distant-sky sort of image appearing behind all the scenery if I'm, say, in an outdoorsy sort of vista and the scenery and props are not completely filling the entire field of view. I have gone into the Render tab, selected Render Settings, and under the Environment, I have Draw Dome turned to On, and when I mouse over the little downward-pointing-trangle under Environment Map, I see a picture pop up that shows I have an image named something like DTHDR-RuinsB-500.hdr there, and I see a sort of blurry image that looks like some brownish, uneven walls, some blue sky and some clouds. But when I render the scene, all I see is bright WHITE in the distance behind all the trees and ground I have rezzed in the scene. I'd tried loading one of the other HDRIs from a search for HDRI done from my Content Library tab, but the all-sky HDRI I've loaded from that then drastically changes the light scheme in the scene, so I quit back out of the scene without saving that change and reloaded the scene from the one saved out previously. I just want to have something other than empty alpha off in the distance! I.e. I want something like blue sky and clouds way out there. Am I missing something?
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Well, for one thing, you have your environment intensity turned up from the default 1 to a value of 2. Maybe that is washing out the background of the HDRI image. The default DTHDR-RuinsB-500.hdr is a very very low resolution HDRI. It is useful for basic ambient lighting, but it will provide only a blurry background image, because of that low resolution. The more you zoom your camera in, the more blurry the background provided by this HDRI will be. To get a nice sky background, you will need a much higher resolution HDRI file. You may need to rotate the new HDRI file that you load (in the Render Settings Environment), to get the light coming from the direction you want.
You could try sun and sky only and see what that gives you. It should be a plane blue sky with light from above. Have you changed the Tone Mapping settings? The default settings should be 128/8/100 for speed/fstop/iso.
I upped the environment intensity to 2 because I was trying to do a nice, bright afternoon Summer-in-the-Sun sort of scene, but the render was coming out closer to early evening than noontime. In retrospect I should have gone into the settings on the Distant Light I'd placed into the scene and upped the numbers for that, but this is a scene I'd started working on months back, shelved, and came back to, and I'd forgotten that that's how I'd lit the scene.
In any event, when I went into a search of my system for HDRI, I loaded one of the items from the Epic Skydomes: Cloud Haven HDRI pack I'd bought recently, but when I went to render the scene, while it inserted the clouds in the distance like I wanted, it also changed the overall colorscheme of the lit scene to something.... I dunno... light tan or something. It just didn't look "bright, cheery, Summer afternoon" enough to me anymore, so I quit back out of the scene and reloaded the previously saved version without that HDRI applied.
editted to add:
Okay, having loaded the scene again, I see I have two lights in there, one is named LIGHT2 and the other is named UberEnvironment2.1, I think I may have loaded those in from some premade light-the-scene-as-if-it's-a-bright-sunny-beach kind of package, but I don't really remember. What should I be lookinng for in there to change this to the light level I want for the scene?
The UberEnvironment light doesn't work in Iray it can be deleted from the scene as the dome does that job.
Well, I finally just resorted to inserting a backdrop prop behind the section of the set where the distant-empty was visible in the one particular camera view I was having the issue with. Stretched the thing to rediculous lengths to fill the whole, narrow stripe of area visible behind the hills and trees along the top of the rendered image area. Not completely satisfied with that solution, but it worked.
Edit your backdrop image in an editor like Photoshop, to crop it to the same aspect ratio as your image render. Then when you add the cropped image as the backdrop in DS, it won't stretch out of shape.
@nomad-ads_8ecd56922e
Your problem is most likely in your settings and your choice of HDRI. If you had looked at the promos for Cloud Haven, you would have noticed that there isn't much blue sky. If you would have used Sun-Sky only with Draw Dome On (as recommended, you would have gotten a result like the first attached render. The second attached render is the default ruins HDRI with defualt render settings. Thrid attachment is RealWorld HDR with the Road A HDRI. You should reset your Render Settings to default or you will lawys be plagued with whatever problem you are experiencing.