hi there everyone i'm doing a piece with a landscape photograph imported as a background. i've carefully positioned my characters so far so good but when i render the photo for some reason gets squeezed into an almost square shape, it only shrinks in width - the height stays the same., leaving a wide white margin down the sides where photo was, the character doesn't get squeezed anybody know what i'm doing wrong?

Either:

Set your preview/render image size to be the same ratio as the imported photo, or

Use a 1-sided square  (proportioned to your photo's size) and apply the photo to that. Once the square has the corret proportions, you can then move it back in the Z axis (so it doesn't interfere with any other props in the scene) and use scale to size it properly (turn off "casts/receives shadows") for the square, and plug the photo into the AMBIENT node for the square. Make diffuse black)...

The latter is my preferred approach (but doesn't always work). OTOH, loading a background image always seem to cause more problems the it's worth...

Just my humble opinion..

Cheers,
Diolma

You didn't say, but if you have Poser 6 there is an even easier way.
Just  go to the material room.  If you are not that familiar with the
material room there is a box that says Simple/Advanced.
Click on Advanced.  Then click on the background of your scene
Then find a box labled BG Picture and  then put a check in Auto_Fit
of the BG picture box. Problem solved.

is there a way to break the aspect ratio? it can be done in other programs.

The auto-fit option will fit the background picture to the render window size, regardless of the aspect ratio, pakled.  That's one of the reasons this is a nice fix.

oooh thanks for your answers I do have poser 6, so it looks like it's an easy fix and i'm quite familiar with using nodes (but clearly no expert) this never happened in poser 5 but i do like using background photos for my skies many thanks again dawn

we are not smart..;) s'ok..as long as you got an answer..

it wasn't as easy as it sounded i checked the nodes and the background was already on autofit i tried taking the background off and putting it back in but that didn't work i put a 'square' primative in and made it to measure - but that turned out all fuzzy - perhaps i should have used the hi res square? i've given up for now i'll have another go in a few days thanks again x

As well as having Auto fit selected, make sure your maximum texture resolution in your render settings is larger than the size of the background you want to use. That should sort it out.