CG Focus Review: Hyperfocal Skies 2
written by Andrew Smallwood
Well, it’s been a bit since my last review of a new product from our friends down under at Hyperfocal and in the meantime Jay has been toiling away bringing us yet another set of skies to complement the first Skies CD which I reviewed some time back. This time Hyperfocal has released some new treats for us. One of the most interesting being the alpha channel skies and horizons with alpha channels for the skies. These were a big labor of love and Jay has taken great pride in spending many hours of time hand editing these alpha channels to be as perfect as possible, but more about them below. The new collection is the third collection that Hyperfocal has released over the last couple of years which included their first Skies set and Terrain Textures as well.
The first thing you’ll notice with this set is that Hyperfocal has moved from CDs to the newer and much higher capacity DVD format, meaning that everything is easily included on one disk rather than having to keep up with two CDs and having to swap disks when you find the texture you wanted wasn’t on the disk that you inserted. In recent years this wasn’t the best approach since there were still many people who didn’t have even a DVD-ROM, but with virtually every new computer coming with at least a reader and in many cases a DVD-burner, it’s a no-brainer to go to the DVD standard.
This new collection contains a total of 65 images, which broken down include the following:
51 Hemispherical skies with complete 360 degree coverage.
11 360 degree horizon images in 32-bit TGA format with alpha channel
3 CG created tiling cloud textures
Now, we’ll discuss each group a bit more in-depth. The first group, as with the hemispherical skies on the first CD, are huge as in monstrous. This is just as you should expect for having a quality and usable sky texture in a 3D or compositing program where you could be rotating your camera and having zooms which would cause smaller images to start revealing artifacts or pixelation, both of which would definitely ruin a shot. To this end the textures in this collection average an amazing 12,000 by 4,000 pixels. That’s really big. To assist you in knowing exactly what you can do with these images and the extents to which you can go, Jay has written up a set of zoom constraints based upon what resolution you plan to use for the textures which appears on the Hyperfocal website. This ranges from 640X480 at 200mm equivalent zoom for television use to digital film with a resolution of 2000X1000 at a 90mm equivalent zoom.
Among the skies you’ll find a wide array of weather and sky conditions. Times range from 2 night skies through 26 sunset/sunrise/twilight skies to broad sunny daylight. Cloud cover also ranges throughout the group from clear skies to heavy overcast and most everything in between. There aren’t too many sky conditions that could occur that aren’t included already and if you find yourself in need of one, there may be a way to get what you need as you’ll see below. As with the other collections, details are outstanding and precise and on this DVD you’ll find all of the images stored in TGA format which maintains outstanding size for virtually no loss in color details.
The 11 horizons with alphas are very cool. They allow you to insert objects coming from behind the horizon up into the sky. An example would be a low-flying plane or that alien mothership coming from the next town after wiping it out and heading in your direction. Easily adding smoke over the horizon and lots of other effects just opens up the possibilities for them. I played around with them for a bit, enjoying the ease of having my objects float behind the trees and buildings effortlessly.
I’ve included a couple of images here of the Hills image, one showing the original image (about 1/10 th of the image) and then a copy of it utilizing the transparency in the alpha channel which I’ve colored in a bright pink so it stands out well. As you can see, Jay spent a great deal of time creating these alpha channels, especially when you consider there are 11 of them. The ones I received for this review were still being perfected, so expect even better stuff out of the final versions that are on the DVD. I hope Jay’s hands have recovered from all of this work. I’ve tried doing this same thing before, but on a much smaller scale and I can tell you, it’s not easy.
HILLS ALL
HILLS ALPHA
By the way, from the thumbnail images I saw first, I just have to find out if Jay actually took a trip to some glacier or maybe even Antarctica with that beautiful snow and ice field. Turns out he’s also a great hand at Terragen and this image is one I could have used some time back when I was working with some snow and ice scenes in LightWave.
The last group is a unique one in the Hyperfocal range and a very interesting one as well. These are the alpha channel tiling cloud images. These images are a unique addition to this package. They allow you to add clouds to skies that don’t have them or modify cloudy images to have more depth and detail! There is a nice demonstration of this on the Hyperfocal web page showing a tiling image, the clear sky of one of the regular images and then a combined image showing clouds added to it. I’m sure not only does this offer you the option to work with his skies at various sizes to create different effects, but may inspire some of us to create our own unusual skies for special needs. I have to say that this is something I hadn’t actually considered myself for creating clouds on a background image and the effect can be quite nice!
The Hyperfocal Skies 2 DVD price comes in about more than the original Skies release, making Skies 2 right at 0US. With the inclusion of the new textures and the work that Jay put into the alpha channel horizons, this really is a very reasonable increase and it keeps the cost per texture almost the same as the original set with the extra images this time around. As a bonus, for those who haven’t purchased the first set and want to buy both, Hyperfocal is offering a 10% discount if you buy both sets together. Adding up the number of images in each brings the total to over 110 skies and landscapes!
The original set of skies I found to be a terrific release that really put Hyperfocal at the forefront of producing and offering textures to use for your skies, eliminating the use of sometimes poor looking CG skies or having to shoot and produce your own. This latest release continues the trend, making realistic skies in your CG or compositing environment a breeze and it also adds brings added value with the skies all being 360- degree hemispherical images and the addition of the tiling alpha channel clouds to give your skies a unique look. I believe they are definitely worth checking out. You can download a sample image in a lower resolution format from the Hyperfocal site to see just how well put together they are. It’s a great deal smaller at 1536X512, but you can see the quality even at this size. The full-scale versions are spectacular.
Thanks again to Jay at Hyperfocal Designs for allowing us to review their latest offering.
BTW, don’t forget to read the reviews of the other Hyperfocal releases here on CG Focus and you can visit the Hyperfocal website at http://www.hyperfocaldesign.com for more details on the specific images included in any of the sets or to place an order. Free shipping from Australia is definitely a bonus!
