Creating my Scene

The first aspect I created for the environment was the sky dome. I chose to use the skydome to create an effective backdrop as it allows for a 3-D world effect though is very simple to implement . This was done by creating a basic polygonal sphere and editing a few of the attributes. This first attribute i changed was the sub divisions to allow for a more natural and smoother looking sphere. I then proceeded to delete the bottom 1/2 of the sphere to reduce the clutter on the view panel. The next step was to reverse the surface normals which allowed me to turn the surface of the inside out, this allowed me to texture the inside rather than the outside. I then set the back face culling of the sphere to full. This allowed me to only view inside of the sphere which helped tremendously when editing other aspects inside the dome. The final aspects of the sphere I changed was the cast and receive shadow options in the render stats. This will stop the sky dome from casting and shadows onto the terrain once the scene is rendered.

For the texture of the sky dome I chose to use a surface shader materiel, I chose this because the surface does not respond to light in any way so none of the lights used in the scene would change the effect. For the out colour I chose a Ramp option. The ramp option was used to give an effect of the sky appearing darker as the sky gets further away from the horizon.

For the terrain I chose to use 4 separate polygonal planes and arranged them into a box formation to give me a terrain field to create my animation on. this was created inside the sky dome to give the feel of a natural world. For the four outer walls of the terrain a surface shader was used the the texture so the light would play no part in its display. I then used a bitmap file to for the colour of the texture to give a mountain range effect. For the base of the terrain a simple Lambert texture was used, I then used the pipette tool to gain the closest colour match to the mountain range to create a more unified feel. A bump map was then placed on the texture to give the terrain base more detail. I chose a bump map over a displacement map to keep the rendering to a reasonable speed.