Hi Ono: there is a typo in the UPDATE word.
And to avoid misunderstandings, I'd change the Mac OSX entry with 10.7.X in the lower installers link details

Hi Pibuz,
Leaving the bottom hemisphere black in the new sky model was intentional. However, I can change it if need be. Would it be more helpful if it was e.g. a ground colour?

Would be great if it was just an extension of the horizon sky color. It really helps in pretty well any scene where you have the camera above the horizon and the horizon isn't all covered up by geometry. It's terrible having a big black band behind your scene...

Hi Tom,
The problem with extending the horizon colour downwards, is that the horizon can be quite bright, and extending it downwards makes the lower hemisphere disproportionately bright. What about extending it downwards but blending it into a darker ground colour, such as grey or green?

Just empty sky would be the best for me (kinda as it was previously), for the cases Tom pointed out.

Perhaps if it faded to a neutral grey? The thing is that usually the scene has a floor/ground which masks illumination from the bottom hemisphere anyway... Even if the horizon was dragged down only about 10-15 degrees, before fading to black/grey, it would help 90% of the cases where you see a slight bit below the horizon just because your scene doesn't extend to infinity.

Hi Tom,
I'll do some experiments with fading to grey. (or maybe the 'average' sky colour, .i.e. the colour a grey surface would be if lit by the sky)

Thanks Nick!

Would be cool to eventually see your method for generating sky data as a plugin or standalone app with some of those old cloud tests and a spherical camera and things to generate different sky maps :) Could be a neat toy to simplify making cool custom skies for your Indigo (and other) renders!

EDIT: Then again, I suppose that's what programs like Terragen are there for.

The new sky model looks fantastic, Ono!
I agree with Tom that a neutral grey could be the best solution. Indirect illumination from below is not sky blue, except on water scenes.
Maybe a user-defined color in the exporters might be the most elegant solution.

There's something I had in mind, if background settings would allow blend maps for environments on the same layer then it could be possible to pick an arbitrary env map for its bottom half and blend the skylight above.

Can this be done ?

Good job Indigo team ! thanks

Hmm.. how do you access the new sky?

Also I agree with indigo having a way to clean out unused materials, specially when you use GPU if you keep adding materials to the scene, even if you are replacing already existing ones, eventually you run out of memory.

It would be nice for new materials to have Colour checked by default.

SSS seems to be a lot faster on PT with GPU

x64 on win7

Hi Snorky,
This one is tricky to replicate. Can you tell us exact instructions to replicate the bug?

Thanks!

Ah, nevermind, can replicate it now.

any reason why there's no ground plane option to begin with in indigo? (or is there?)

i guess if the entire infinite plane would actually have to render then that's a good reason no to have to option as i guess it would take forever to render but if that's not the reason, what is?

t.hanks