Week 7 Class Practical: Part 4 - Skydome

The last part of this weeks class practical is an exercise about creating a skydome. Skydomes are an efficient way of creating a sky that is visible 360 degrees around the models in your scene. The effect is made by applying a texture to the inside of a large spherical object in the scene. To begin, I have created a sphere and scaled it up to be very large in the scene. To allow the skydome to appear detailed, I created the sphere with extra divisions.

After this, I deleted the faces on the bottom half of the sphere to create the "dome" effect. Because of the way that objects are created in Maya, the normal faces (the grey faces, not the black faces) are on the outside of the object, but we want the normal faces to be on the inside of the object otherwise the texture won't appear inside. To achieve this you have to select the object, go to the "Mesh Display menu and select "Reverse".

Working on objects that are inside the dome can be difficult. A tip to make this easier is to add the dome to it's own layer. This way we can make the layer invisible, or even set the layer as a "Template". Setting the layer to template makes so I'm unable to accidentally select the dome while working on other objects.

We also don't want the dome to be considered in the scene when it comes to casting shadows, or interfering with light, so there are a few options we have to disable in the attribute editor. By selecting the dome shape and the "Render Stats" we can disable the "Cast Shadows" and "Receive Shadows" options, stopping the dome from interfering with these settings.

Finally, we have to texture the dome by assigning a "Surface Shader" material to it. This type of material doesn't interact with light at all which is perfect for our purposes. Below are pictures of the finished dome, one with the grid from outside, and one inside showing how effective the dome is.