Why are sky textures not showing up?

Question

I'm a Blender noob and trying to do something I thought would be simple, but is causing me grief. I'm trying to add a sky outside the windows of the classroom scene found in this Blender file I found online.

I've tried the tutorials here and here, and neither of them show any alterations to the scene when I go through the steps. It's like something in the setup of the file is overriding what I'm trying to accomplish.

I have no idea what's going on, or how to even find what settings to tweak, turn on/off etc. Any guidance would be wonderful.

Answer 1

This appears to be due to a several things:

• Transparent is enabled in Render settings > Film. This renders the image with alpha transparency instead of sky. Useful for compositing, but hides the sky texture (at least in viewport render).

• Ray visibilities are disabled on the world material.

• The compositing setup doesn't take into account the sky texture. This is understandable, as a real-life camera would over-expose the sky when taking a picture with a reasonably exposed interior.

So to make this work, you'll need to modify the compositing setup.

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Start by adding your sky texture to the world material. Ensure the strength is set correctly and at least Camera ray visibility is enabled:

Disabling Properties > Render > Film > Transparent won't work in this particular case, since the compositing setup uses it create glare from the sky. Instead you can use the Environment pass:

1. Enable the environment pass in Properties > Renderlayers > Passes:

   

2. Connect the environment pass output of the _mainScene Render layers node to the Alpha over node in the COLOR CORRECTION frame:

   

3. You may have to reduce the amount of glare by reducing the Fac value of this mix node:

   

Render: