First off sky colours.  I have the Wilderness Packs, btu would liek some of my action to take place at night.  further to some of my previous questions, I have now got a firey glow and twi-light shadowing inthe main part of my scene.  (Thanks for all answers that helped with this) but unfortunately, there is still a lovely mid-morning blue summer sky in the background!  Any way that the sky can be darkened? The only solution I can thnk of is to be clever with a 2D pic placed on the billoard, and positionsed between the liveplants and the skyin shot.  Haven't had the time to try this out yet, but before I do, wondered if anybody had an easier or more practical solution.

Secondly - and hopefully this is more simple.  Is there any way to for SFX to start in full flow?  For example, the snow FX starts falling, but if I want my scene to take place where it is already snowing, because this causes an editing gaff (as was seen in the "All I Want For Christmas" which I put up in December.)  I am currently using the HellFire although sized down to give a smaller campfire type of flame, but again, I want theis to be a fire already burning, not one that builds up from nothing over the first few frames.

All responses will be greatly received.  Thanks in advance.

Rich.

For the colours of the sky you can adjust it to your liking with 3DXchange if you have it. For any non-liveplant 3D scene you can open it in 3DXchange and play around with the material colour setting until you get the desired result.

For the Wilderness 3D scenes the problem is liveplants will not be available in your scene when you export it back to iClone which kind of defeats the object, but sadly there isn't much to be done at this time. There were quite a few freebie 3D scenes given away in the newsletter that work well with this process and may suit your needs.

You can see from the example image that a bright sky was changed to an eerie dark red just by changing the material colour in 3DXchange.

When it comes to having snow or flames already full on when you start your project, the obvious thing to do would be to edit the beginning few frames out in your image editor. You can adjust the timeline accordingly if needed. That's how they do it in real world filming. They won't call action until the scene effects are at the right level so thinking the same way in iClone can help get around these problems.

Alternatively you can play around with the settings under Modify to maybe make the start height higher or the speed to make things appear faster. This can help but can take a while to get right. You may be able to get a compromise this way if you prefer not to edit the scene afterwards.

Peter Edwards
Forum Moderator

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