3DN-SimpleSky Documentation

How it Works

The basic premise is to generate a series of spheres around your scene comprised of 1 outer layer with the “3DN-SkyBG” material and 3 inner layers with the “3DN-SimpleSky” material. The “SimpleSky” material is essentially a fancy noise texture with transparency and a tonne of customisable options. This generates the clouds on the 3 inner layers. The distance between each layer creates the subtle parallax effect that you see in the real sky. The outer layer is a super simple colour ramp setup to make it as intuitive as possible.

GeoNodes Scale Controls (Modifier tab)

Sky_Scale: Diameter of the inner most cloud layer in meters.

Sky_Z_Squash: Allows you to reduce the Z scale only (e.g. "0.700" means the Z scale is 70% of the X/Y scale)

"3DN-SimpleSky" Controls Demo

Cloud Generation

Cloud Generation is relatively straight forward. "Scale", "detail" and "roughness" work in exactly the same way as a noise texture. Cloud Distribution controls act as an addition/subtraction of the clouds. (see examples)

Cloud Tint Colour

Easily change the cloud colour with controls that are familiar and intuitive even with limited Blender experience.

Cloud Distortion

Cloud Distortion is broken up into 3 parts. General distortion controls followed by two additional frames containing more specific controls for "Cloud Wisp" and "Cloud Wobble". I will show examples of what each of these controls do although by far the best results are achieved by jumping into Blender and playing around with them for yourself. 

General Distortion Controls

Cloud Wisp

Cloud Wobble

"3DN-SkyBG" Shader

The background material has been made as simplistically as possible so it's super easy to customise. The "MixShader" node allows for an easy transition from day to night. However, everything from colours to brightness can be edited in the same way you would with any other shaders.