Stormy skies
 

Need Help creating a great looking stormy sky to go with a water scene I did. Can anybody help me with that or pint me to a sky tute. I tried using the skygen plugin for my LW 7.0 but it does not work real weel.. Crashes my pc; anyother way of getting nice stormy clouds, and etc.. the sky does not have to move could be static.. Also is it possible to do lightning in LW or should I use after fx for that.

Please just help me with the sky tute then the rest later


Thank you

If you just need a static sky then you could look for an image on the web and use it as the backdrop to the scene, maybe add some fog etc to give it some depth

Hmm... if skygen doesn't work for you, how about Skytracer? You should be able to render a good sky from there, and bake it to a panoramic HRD map for remapping to a sphere and using as a static backdrop...

(in fact, you might want to check out the grassy knoll tutorial here on Simply Lightwave since this discusses the technique).

As for Lightning, then either search for relevant plugins on Flay.com to do this for you, or for a real simple lightning effect, simply light the scene with a really bright area light incredibly briefly. For forked lightning, simply map an image to a plane and dissolve this into the scene when you bring the light flash up...