Sky and Sun tutorial.

One of the first things I did when I was looking at texturing was experimenting with ways of creating the sky in this wilderness, as well as the sunrise and sunset.

I came across this tutorial which explains how I can create a sky by using the Mental Ray rendering software, which is built into Maya: http://en.9jcg.com/comm_pages/blog_content-art-109.htm

I created this test scene of the sun setting by following the tutorial:

I think it is a quick way of creating various sky effects, but the only downside I have found is that rendering takes much longer and it seems that the sky does not show up in the video file, unless you save it as a video sequence in FCheck.

I will continue to explore ways of playing with the colour of the sky itself to get a more red texture and also methods of including clouds.