Poser 5 Nodes 101 - Cloudy Sky
Thanks to Ajax for taking the time to explain the basics of nodes in Poser 5 and for allowing me to post this information here!
(First the settings, then the explanation.)
(In case you missed the download for the materials, here it is again.)
....and here's the material for the sky. This material is applied to the default "background", not to any model or object.
There are only four nodes here (other than the root node), so it's a bit easier to see what's happening.
I wanted a cloudy sky so I started out with the clouds node. You can see how I've set the parameters to give me the colours and cloud density I want.
But I don't want the clouds to be evenly lit like that. I want the sky to be dark near the horizon and light near the zenith. How do I do that? Well if you've used Photoshop then you're probably familiar with the concept of multiplying colours. When you multiply black with any other colour you get black. When you multiply white with any other colour, you get the colour unchanged. To get the look I wanted I needed something I could multiply with my clouds node. It needed to be a smooth gradient from black at the bottom to white at the top.
I can get that easily by using a v texture coord node. This is like the v in uv mapping. It runs from zero at the bottom of a texture mapping to 1 at the top and the visual representation of that is black at the bottom ranging to white at the top - just what I want. Almost.
I really need the centre of the map to be closer to black, so what I've done is filtered that v node through a math node set to the "power" function. For each point in the v node map, I'm squaring the value (where black is zero and white is one). When you square fractions, they get smaller, so I'm making the whole map darker but the effect is much more pronounced toward the bottom.
Now that I have what I want showing up in the math node, I just need to multiply it with my original clouds texture. I plug both of them into the inputs of a colour math node set to multiply. Now I have a nice cloudy sky texture that fades to black as you go down and is looking pretty dark at about the right place for my horizon.
That's exactly what I want, so I just plug it into the root node in the colour channel. Done.
The key thing when working with nodes is to experiment lots. There are lots of different node types and they all do different things. To use them effectively, you need to get to know every one so you can think about how to combine them creatively to get the effect you want. I'm still a long way from feeling like I know all there is to know about this tool. I can do some great stuff with it but there is so much more left for me to discover. It's very cool.
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Please note - if you'd like to post a copy of this tutorial elsewhere, you'll need to contact Ajax directly. Ajax retains all rights to this work - I only have permission to post it on my site.