Sky Dome Tutorial

Sky Dome Tutorial

As I needed a sky dome to put around the Death star to create the effect of space so I did the sky dome tutorial to learn how to do this correctly.

I started using a Geosphere which would go round the outside of all the models in the scene.

Changing the Geosphere to a hemisphere cuts the shape in half so that it only covers from the ground and not all the way underneath. The hemisphere needs to be set just lower than the ground so that the edges are not seen.

With my hemisphere set I needed to apply a texture to it. The problem is that if I apply a texture directly to it, the texture will be on the outside of the hemisphere. To solve this problem I needed to add a NORMAL modifier to it and enable the FLIP NORMAL option, this then puts the texture on the inside of the hemisphere instead of the outside.

To make the hemisphere more realistic it is a good idea to lower the top of the hemisphere. For this I will use an XFORM modifier, this allows it to be animated easier and it can be used to modify any layer in the stack. On the gizmo layer of the modifier the hemisphere is modified to look like this.