Advanced Animation (9) - Rendering

After I had started the rendering process and realised the issues addressed in my last post I still had to render the intro scene of my animation. This turned out far darker than the main animation sequence which required me to add lights, or you wouldn't be able to see the animation at all. As I was going to fiddle about with that anyway I decided to fix the sky texture problem as well. It turns out to fix the shadow issue on a sky dome, you have to use a shader material instead of a lambert which illuminates the object by default and omits lighting form the light source (when the appropriate boxes are ticked). I then added a directional light which lit up the scene just as it was in the Maya file, as I expected it to look. This was fine for me, as I wouldn't be able to give it a nice "sunny afternoon" look anyway. Here is the result of that render: