Maya® Studio Projects Texturing and Lighting

Project: Creating a Sky in Maya

When lighting a daylight scene, it's difficult to judge the overall success of the render when the background remains black. To avoid this, you can add a sky while working in Maya. There are several approaches you can take.

Changing the Environment Color

By default, empty space in Maya is colored 0, 0, 0 black. To change the color that is used, open the rendering camera's Attribute Editor tab, expand the Environment section, and change the Background Color. Although the resulting render will show no color variation in the empty areas of the scene, a blue Background Color does provide a sense of sky. Note that a nonblack Background Color can interfere when compositing an alpha channel (the fourth channel that encodes ...