I've searched the forum to no avail... just installed SR4 and previously fine pictures are now rendering with a grey strip down the size and the background picture 'squished' into the remaining space. BG pic looks fine while I'm editing - right size and no grey bits but when I render its all squished up. Its not a problem with the pic not matching document window size - these DID render fine pre-SR4. And annoyingly, SR4 limits the size of a background pic to 4096px. Grrrr. Any help would be most gratefully appreciated. I'm not usually one for asking questions but I can't find any info on this and its driving me nuts! Steph

Plug it into the background shader instead of loading it in as a regular background picture. Also, make sure your render itself is of the same ratio as the background picture when you render using one.

Thanks for the advice, however I tried setting the background through the shaders, its not making any difference (even with a different background picture I'm getting the same effect. And all my renders/background pics are the same ratio at 4:3.

This is what I'm getting when I render in draft

This is what my background pic actually looks like - note the squashedness in the render above

When I render in production, up until last night I was oinly getting partial renders with maybe 1/4 of the image rendered correctly and the rest left as the tiled squared you see whilst its rendering. However as of this morning, its rendering completely black (and this is all images, regardless of background)

Time for a reinstall? I assume reinstalling doesn't affect all my downloaded products in the poser directories

It looks to me that you are just doing something wrong with setting up the background picture.

Thanks xantor, but the background pictures were working fine before I installed SR4 Steph

When you install sr4 a lot of the render options get reset or changed some way, so maybe you should check that the settings for the background are okay? I am almost certain that this problem is a background setting error.

Looks like you're rendering to same window, But if not make sure your work window is the same proportion as the new renderwindow. Sorry if I'm stating the obvious.

could you show your render settings? that would make it a lot easier to see any problems.

When you import a bg pic poser should ask you a question like "picture resolution is different than render window..do you want to resize to match?" .... if the res of the pic is smaller than the render size and you answer no.... thats what you'll get

Around the time of SR4.0 oir maybe sr3 there was a backgoung bug introduced that dr4.1 fixes - see the readme. It MAY be connected with that. Ouit of interest, does turning mesh smoothing off have any effect? Or rendering to a seperate window of the same resolution as the preview window? Cheers, Cliff

Thanks people for all your suggestions... a couple of reboots and a swift kick to the behind seems to have fixed it. This program will be the death of me... its so inconsistant!

Yeah - always

Are you sure you didn`t just accidentally fix the settings?

Absolutely positive that there was nothing at all wrong with the settings and they're the same now as they were previously.

That is very strange.