Now obviously I don't know of a way to literally bring a Terragen landscape directly into Poser (besides exporting the terrain file as an .OBJ). What I want to do, however, is to render Terragen backgrounds, and texture those to standard props in Poser. What results is Poser in the foreground (characters and a similar ground mesh), and a beautiful Terragen landscape in the background (Terragen textured to a prop). Now, my question is this: how could I create a complete 360 degree panoramic texture in Poser? Is it feasible, or perhaps there's a way to cheat the effect? Or maybe is there a dome to place over the set which can be textured from the inside (at high resolution)? The reason the Terragen landscapes need to be textured is because obviously I will be having camera movements, so the background cannot be static. I really don't have the money or the time to indulge in a professional landscaping program, not to mention Terragen produces such fantastic results as-is. My animation project requires a lot of outdoor environments, thus I need photorealistic terrain just for this. So besides that, does anyone have any tips or alternative ideas for what I'm trying to accomplish? One thing I am worried about is being able to notice the transition line at which the 3D Poser ground ends, and the 2D Terragen texture begins (Perhaps just make the 3D ground as big as possible and avoid the birdeye perspectives?). And, of course, the wide shots will be completely Terragen with Poser characters rendered on top (along with ground shadows, etc). Thanks for your time.

You could try the freeware program Terranimator, which makes landscapes for rendering in the free Anim8or 3d modeller. It has a facility for rendering a landscape onto a sphere. You can then export that texture and put it on a sphere inside Poser, to act as a skydome. I'm not sure if Terragen can do this, as it's a while since I took a look at it, but it might be worth asking over at the Terragen forum. As for making the background, that's not such a problem. You can even do it in Poser. FOR A CYLINDRICAL BACKDROP (CYCLORAMA) 1) Open the cylinder prop from the "primitives" library. 2a) Use the grouping tool to make the top and bottom of the cylinder a new material. Then go to the material room and make that material 100% transparent, with no reflections, etc. OR 2b) Use the grouping tool to select the sides, make a new prop, and delete the original cylinder. (Dr Geep has posted tutorials here about using the grouping tool) 4) Scale up to suit your scene. If you use a modelling program, you can just bring in a cylinder and delete the top and bottom. FOR A SKYDOME Simply open the sphere prop from the "primitives" library and scale it up till it's big enough to look like the sky. Depending on what kind of texture you use, you may have to import it into UVMapper and apply different kinds of mapping. FADING THE GROUND INTO THE SKY Imagine your skydome is spherically mapped, so that the horizon comes just about halfway up the map. Make a very small black and white texture - 256 x 256 will do - white at the top, black at the bottom, fading into each other halfway up. Apply this to the sky as a transparency map. Make a second texture with a white circle on a black background. Blur the join between black and white. Apply this to the ground as a transparency map. Now, if you line up the fadeout circle on the ground with the fadeout area of the skydome, the two will seem to dissolve into each other. If you make the background colour a pale grey or bluegrey, you'll get the effect of haze at the horizon. You could try to get this effect with the depth-cue function, but it's rather more difficult to control.

One grouping tool step to add -- inverting the normals, because you'll be looking at the inside of these props. RDNA have some good scenery props. Their Skydome is a freebie, and there's also a lot of free textures, both the sky and tileable ground textures intended for their Microcosm product. Many of the scenery propsets I've seen have a slightly raised rim on the ground, so you don't see the transition between ground and "wall". Consider having two or three concentric wall props, each using a transmapped skyline. The outer ones would have increasing amounts of blur applied to their texture and transmap, and the texture greyed out, to emulate the effects of atmospheric haze. With Poser 5/6 there are various Material Room methods to replace those small textures with shader nodes. You don't want the scenery walls or skydone to cast shadows. In P5/6 it also makes a difference to apply textures to the Ambient channel rather than Diffuse. That way, you don't see shadows cast on the background at render time.

bkmk

What I have done, with some success, is to create the Terragen scene and make sure I have more than enough foreground. I then take that scene into Paintshop Pro (not a big photoshop fan...too many buttons...) and I pull up the templates for Cyclorama and cut and paste the Terragen to work into the template. It takes a little practice for the seam area, I have to admit. Also, if you have more than enough foreground,and this works well for water or ocean based scenes, you can just lay it over the template as a new layer, cut out what doesn't fit, and call it good. Remember to save the new layer by itself so you don't overwrite your template.

Excellent ideas, thanks for all your replies and help! I downloaded the SkyDome v3 over at RDNA, and I think it just might be what I'm looking for. I will have to find a convenient way to texture it with the horizon included (background mountains, not just sky), but I'll experiment on my own. I noticed that MicroCosm has a ton of terrain stuff that I could definately utilize since my new animation project is sort of a Post-Apocalyptic adventure. I'll be sure to update you guys with screenshots after a few render tests before production begins!