SkyBox World Shader | Blender Addon

Animated environment

SkyBox provides tools to create and animate realistic lighting, fog, clouds and rainbow. The dynamic change of day and night creates unique shots for every day. Over time changes seasons, barometric pressure, sky tone, several types of clouds, and even twinkling stars.

Friendly interface

All parameters have comfortable values ​​for perception ​​and are limited to recommended ranges. For example, the luminosity of the Sun can be set from 0 to 100, which will to make a large Sun that does not give light or reverse. The fog render-layer is switched with one click.

Convenient settings

Addon panel provides access to the most important world shader settings, but more settings is contained in World Shader. Special for ease editing or creating custom world - the internal interface of the shader as simple as possible for perception and contains detailed explanations.

Procedural environment

Procedural stars, earth, sun and moon render much faster and don't use video memory. The addon contains a set of textures suitable for most cases. There is also a convenient image selector and loader for environment. Fog can be created with one click, and then adjust its intensity

Position of the stars is identical to real. Seasons change according lunar calendar

Easy compositing sets

World Presets

• Earth - homely planet with moderate lighting and seasons
• Mars - cold planet with weak atmosphere and blue sunsets
• Moon - lifeless satellite without atmosphere and long days
• Venus - hot planet with heavy sulfur clouds and dark nights
• Volcanos - superhot planet close to the center of the galaxy
• Synthwave - endless and unusual luminous digital cyberworld
• Minecraft - sky above the cubic world of miners and builders

Information & Tips

• Shader works in Cycles mode and Blender 3.0+
• Recommended Blender version 3.2 for correct works of all functions
• Works on Windows and Linux without any bug
• Fog and Glare functions work after render, not in real time
• Fog intensity is best adjusted after first render in the compositing workspace
• Fog layer add ~30% render time
• For the better display of fog, it is better to hide the ground layer from the field of view
• For simple animate time - write in the Hours parameter: #frame/500+8
• For optimization project - turn off all unused textures and make a cleanup
• For a good render choose good combinates colors for the sky, sunset and sun
• For advanced compositing, render a objects with transparent world and combine it with the background layer
• Use Glare for realistic lighting effects
• Increasing atmospheric density is most useful at high altitude or low extinction
• To edit nodes group press Tab, to exit press Ctrl+Tab
• Use plane with option Object Properties>Visibility>Shadow Catcher under rendered object to make the "stand on shader" effect
• Experiment with the world shader, it will open up great possibilities.

SkyBox shader easy to learn and there is a handy panel on the right side

All gradients and detailed settings can be easily found in their respective groups

Plans for development

• Geometry nodes based realistic clouds and weather
• Improved calendar
• More textures
• Better procedural moon
• Procedural moon editor
• Edit gradients from the panel
• Texture loading optimization
• Polar Lights
• Interface for save and delete custom worlds