Own Backgrounds

Wednesday, February 08, 2012

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Own Backgrounds

Published on 16 January 2008

Own Backgrounds Sure, Vue has some cool sky presets and offers you several tools to create and edit skies.
But maybe you want to use your own pictures as a sky or a background for your render.

Here is an easy way how to use photos as a few sky.

First, maybe you guess it, you need a photo which will be used as the sky.

Try to get a picture with a very high resolution. For our purpose higher resolution = better :-)
No fire up Vue D'Esprit and create an alpha plane.
From the top menu choose : Objects/Create/AlphaPlane
The standard Alpha plane dialogue will open:

Double click into the black square under "Color picture" and navigate to the picture you want to use as a background sky.

Vue will show you a preview in the Alpha Plane Options. Now click OK and Vue will load the Alpha Plane into the working window.
Now enlarge the Alpha Plane and move it in the background towrads the end of the ground grid. Make sure that nothing from the original sky is visible and the Alpha plane face3s the camera !
While the Alpha Plane is still selected, open Vue's material editor. Open the effects tab and under "Lightning" set all values to zero, except the Luminous one. Set this to 100%.
Also uncheck "Cast Shadows" and "Receive Shadows"
To add a final touch of realism, go to the Haze and Fogtab in Vue's atmosphere editor.
Choose values that fit your needs here. We have done the tutorial with the values below.
Fog Color: R:248 G:237 B:222
Fog Density: 60
Haze Color: R:70 G:98 B:106
Haze Density: 200

If you don't see any haze or fog effects play with the density values and move the Alpha Plane a little bit more in the background.
Add something to your scene like a water plane and do a quick test render. Here is our result: