the sky...

Found a couple of nice pictures on the web of the sky at night, but none of them can be used on its own. The pictures will have to combined with a few other ones to look good.

After some research i realised we have two options...we could either make the sky in photoshop and then use it as a texture on a plane in maya, Or we could use it as a background layer in after effects.

I first tried using a random image as texture in maya, but it wasnt working as well as i would've hoped. To create a sky in maya, the texture has to be applied differently than the usual textures. Instead of using an image as colour (which is what we usually do to apply a texture), I was told by Nils to use the image as Incandescence. This is because the brightness of the sky is not supposed to be affected by the lights on the scene, so to avoid this we use the texture as incandescence instead of colour.

But the problem here is that the texture can only be seen on the plane when it is rendered. This made it very difficult to work with, as I cannot see the texture unless i render the scene..

will try using it in after effects instead.