Has anyone developed backgrounds for Poser 11's The Construct? If so, where are they?

Alas the construct is a tricky fellow and making new textures for it is somewhat of a challenge. I don't know of any openly available texture sets, but you can inquire at the SM graphics forums, home of Poser. I will also do some research and see what I can come up with in the next few days.

OK. Thank you.

I've made some; I also made a fadeaway panel which can be used to hide the UV seam between the ground and background. I'll release that stuff, but at the moment I'm busy working on the Atlantis set.

OK. This sounds really interesting.

seachnasaigh is actually the person I was going to look up for you ... you are well on the way. Seach, can you give our friend here a URL to find some more help? It is allowed.

Hmmm... post failed to appear.

The re-textures I have been using are adaptations of the skydome/terrain of my Lothlorien set; it has a tangle of math nodes to make it fit. Not user friendly, not fit to be made public. For a released texture pack, I'd want to generate new sky/treeline/cityscape panoramas specifically fitted to the construct's proportions and UV mapping. That will have to wait until the weather eases enough for me to run my server rack; the air conditioning is already struggling.

Vilters has made some construct textures; I don't recall offhand if he packed/posted them.

@Inquire, you might want to post your request in the SmithMicro forum.

Possibly OT but alternatively could go paint your own, there are free paint apps like Krita that work with high colour depths and can save as HDR. Both Vilters and EnglishBob have released UV map (see runtimeDNA thread The New Contruct:Tips.. in the Poser 11 forum). Not as easy as using off the shelf photos but if your looking for a particular lighting setup it allows for some control.

Might I also offer making the construct invisible and using bb's envirosphere? If you go through the tutorial you can regulate lighting within the sphere and it has some great additions BUT you will want to create a ground plane with a transparency map to blend at the edges and use ground textures close to your HDRI since unfortunately SF does not use shadow catchers. And a Possible Shaddow Catcher work around here

1- If you turn the construct 180 degrees on the Y-axis the seam in the sky part moves to the positive Z-axis, behinf the default camera position and therefore becomes less irritating. You can slap on a panoramic image. Consequence is the ground texture goes ' south-up'.

2- 'Create perspective UV' in the group editor works again. This gives you another way to apply your favourite image as a background passing across the ground/background separation. The good thing with digital cameras is the images come with the EXIF data that give focal length so you can work out your settings. Remember focal length of Poser cameras relates to traditional 35 mm analog and the width of the viewport. Your EXIF data should give actual focal length of the lens used.

It's cool enough that I have fans running to blow air through the house and keep the servers cool. Workstation Cameron is controlling several servers -and workstation TinkerBell- to network render a sky panorama with an aspect ratio fitted to the P11 construct. The render will be 8192x2560 pixels, at "superior" quality.

First up is a day with sunbeams bursting through clouds ("Sky Aglow"). Second will be a night sky with a bright moon. Then a colorful sunset.

That's 328 total processor cores cooperating on the sky panorama render. Tink is pulling a little over 11GB; the others would be similar.
Galadriel is not involved with the Vue network render, because she's running a Superfly test render of the Atlantis stargate "ka-whoosh". Urania is doing modeling/mapping and Poser file work - she's the machine I'm working on.

This is a textured construct. Here a "hill" morphed construct with a ground texture of 8192x8192 pixels, and with a hi-res plane (from the props folder) to "play" water. The background trees are painted on the "sky" texture in Blender.

If interested, I could make a video in the Poser2Blender2Poser series, (when my hand injury gets better) , because there are 2 ways to do this.

FireFly render with a single Infinite light.

Here is a preview demo of how my new construct textures will fit. The construct's UV seam is the vertical mesh seam in the center. The image map tiles seamlessly.

If you look up at the zenith of the skydome, it still looks good; no seams showing, no major distortion. :D

This is the water texture I'll be using as an add-on pack for Atlantis:

This is looking very impressive and promising.

yeah, that looks great!

New textures and props would be helpful. Could help the Construct be a mini- TerraDome.

Hello Earl, the texture is stretching when you pull the ground plane up high like that. You can eliminate this problem using Blender's stensil painting in the 3D view port. Do not paint on the texture in UV map mode, but repaint the texture in the 3D view port when looking directly on the flank of the mountain. Best regards, Tony

Yes, yes, it is in the video tutorial pipe line, as soon as my hand gets better. best regards, Tony.

Yeah, Tony, I know. This was just a quick render as I was just checking out what the Construct could do. I didn't even bother subdividing anything.

What I would really like to see is treelines, cityskylines and mountainskylines ... that would make the construct a lot more versatile. With grass, rocks, concrete and other textures on the groundplane with the blend feature at the edges. A package with those features and different matching sky conditions ... and we'd have a great product for the marketplace or if so inclined a community freebie.

For a re-shaped terrain, my preference would be to form a new mesh and UV-unwrap it, to avoid the texture stretching/shrinking issue. Those could be released as replacements for the "stock" construct, or the terrain might be simply overlain on top of the construct ground.

I'm using a networked Vue to render the skies. The choice of atmospheres is intentionally the toughest ones to render, which many folks would find impossible to render for themselves. This morning I'm waiting out a slow sky render because I forgot to Alt-X and purge accumulated data before I began the render yesterday morning; that causes Vue to run slowly. My machines are only showing 5%-18% processor activity.

For city skylines and forest treelines, scale has to be considered. If you need to scale up the construct, then the treeline/skyline will be out of scale. to account for that, I may make a second version of each, with the scale doubled.

Wow, what great ideas and insights!!!

No-lights-on Superfly test render of one of the dozen upcoming P11 construct MATs:

I need to correct some errors. In the meantime, more test shots: Earl thought that fiery sunset needed lava...

I'll include that lava MAT in the pack. You can draw your own B&W mask to control where lava shows.

Testing some (optional, and adjustable) Godrays for the Golden Bolts atmo:

Lava. As Martha Stewart says: "That's a good thing."

I'll include an RGB map-controlled ground texture; the idea is that you simply draw colors on a black background to indicate where you want various types of texture to appear.

Uploaded to freestuff, pending approval.