**** - that must be something new - I'm using maya 7 and I don't see it. :(

think its maya 8+, definitely 8.5+

damn you. damn you all to hell! :)

haha.

i have maya 8.0 im pretty sure its in it gonna check once i fix my maya... its being retarded... i clicked it and it said couldnt find some file idk what 1...

the physical sun&sky came with maya 8.5 I think. you get pretty fast results in no time but this background shader does have it´s own quality. I mean it looks pretty convincing, infact it is a real good plugin. but you can simulate the same thing with hdri+FG in mental ray. try using Image based lighting + directional light for the sun. if you choose a hdri with slightly bluetones and make the sun color something between yellow and orange you get similar results like with the physical sun and sky. btw if you lighten your scene with an object´s incandecence beware of the expensive rendertimes. better use hdri or a lightDome in combination with FG or GI or both. check out the secondary diffuse bounces on the FG tab also.

good luck!

Hi,

you can also do realistic daylight with just only one direction light and mental ray rendering.


just play with light photon and final gathering.

buzz me on jatin.soni@yahoo.co.in anytime.

Jatin Soni

You don't need the Physical sky feature to achieve accurate outdoor lighting. Good knowledge of raytracing and FG can produce accurate results. ;)

Hiya,

Does anyone have a tutorial on this?

Cheers in advance

Not exactly a tutorial, but this is how I went about it (as posted earlier in this thread) . . . . . . . . . . .

Global Render Settings > Mental Ray (tab) > Environment > Physical Sun & Sky > Create

[Fellow Newbs: If you're not seeing the Mental Ray tab, you'll need to go to Window > Settings/Preferences > Plug-in Manager, then scroll down until you see "mayatomr.mll" and load it, then check back in your Global Render Settings and you should see Mental Ray as an option in the drop-down next to Render Using:]

Once you've created the MR sun and sky, the Hypershade window is handy for making tweeks.