Sky
 

I need to learn how to make a sky?
I don't want to just make an image plane and put a sky on it. can anyone help me learn another way maby some tutorial I haven't found. I would love to learn. I have looked everywhere and can't find good info. There is some env sky env sphere or something in the hypershade is that a good way don't know how to do it. Thanks to anyone that helps.

Thanks so much for the post so far its giving me a new perspective in maya.

thanks again lucky for me i'm pretty good with photoshop

Thanks thanks thanks... But I still have a question what is the reason for using a nurb instead of a polygon?

Make a nurbs sphere and cut it in half. Kinda like cutting an orange in half. Select the middle isoparm and edit curves>detach curves. Place the half and size it on top of your scene or objects.

Create a lambert material in your hypershade. In your attribute editor add to the color a ramp texture by clicking on the checkered box on the right side of the color. Apply it to the nurbs sphere.

In the ramp texture options select type to U Ramp. That way it's place in the u direction of the sphere. (vertical)

I usually keep the colors of the ramp to three. Click the small circle to change the color at the bottom of the ramp. I keep the top color bright yellow, the mid light blue and the bottom dark blue. Depending on the mood you're trying to set in your scene. You can move the placement of the ramp colors by clicking and dragging the small circle up and down, or if you want to erase a color click the x box to the left.

Voila! you got a sky!

To get clouds it's a bit more complicated. I'll post it though.

Cluods
 

Same ways as before. Create a sphere and cut it in half. This time place it inside the sky sphere. You're going to need a cloud texture for this and photoshop.

http://mayang.com/textures/

You need to be familiar with alpha channels and the tools within photoshop to get this done. Basically you're going to apply a cloud texture all around the bottom half of this newly created sphere and animate the rotation to create the illusion of cloud movement. You can also achieve this with a poly sphere. You just have to layout your uv's properly, take a snapshot and apply the texture. It might be easier for you to do it this way. You can then also mess with the transparency to make the clouds seem transparent.

The main trick is to make the clouds seamless within photoshop using the clone tool and seamless tile tool. Takes a bit of practice. The most important thing is to make the alpha channel for the clouds, that way when you apply it everything else gets taken out except the clouds. Make sure you save your file as a tiff. THis format keeps the alpha info.

theres a tut in the maya help files using fluids.., try that too