DS Sky introduction

DS sky is a very powerful feature and allows the artist to create pretty much any type of a sky environment; from sunrises to sunsets, to stormy clouds and more. And they all look absolutely gorgeous.
One of the coolest features with the sky is the ability to export it to a panorama image. This is useful when the sky doesn't have to be animated, but only be a still backdrop. 

Also, DS has a feature called 3D clouds. This is a volumetric based cloud system, which adds amazing depth and visual beauty to the scene. While this does improve the look of the scene, it also drastically increases rendering time.
Another feature I love is the ability to cast ground shadows from clouds. Though this isn't a new feature, it adds so much more realism to the scene.

It is important to remember that DS sky is the key to all the DS elements. A sky is required to render any DS scene. Without it, you ain't got nothin'. Ok, let's see some of this stuff shall we?

                

Sky Elements

Basically, when you add the DS sky into your scene you'll get something like above. The real beauty of the sky is the speed of the render. Rendering an 800x600 image takes only 15 sec. Render times can vary because there are settings called Flat Earth, Real Earth or Reddening.
Flat Earth renders really fast because it assumes that the earth is just a plane so there's no spherical properties.
Real Earth is a proper sphere, which enables the user to have great sunsets.
The Reddening allows you to have reddish orange color to it. Again this is all based on where the Sun is. 

Also the neat thing is if you move the DS Sun around anywhere in the sky it will change the color of the sky like it would do naturally. If you pull it down to the horizon it will look like a sunset; pull it up to the zenith it will look like mid-day, etc.