I feel a bit daft asking this question because I'm a seasoned user of Poser and have made models for it and everything, but it's only recently I've been fooling around with Background images. Anyway, it seems that no matter what I do, when I render a pic with a background image, the background image always seems to come out low-res and pixellated. For instance, if I import a background pic that is 640 x 640 pixels, then render an image in a new window of 640 x 640, it almost looks as if Poser has somehow "resized" my image smaller and lost detail and then stretched it back to 640 x 640. It looks like you're using a zoom tool on a smaller picture. What's up with that? Am I dumb here, or what?

Poser resizes to your document window size any time the doc window is smaller than Poser's currently stored version of the image. So if you start with an 800600 image, import into a document with a doc window that's 640480, resize the window to 320240 and then render at 800600, what you wind up with is a background that's been scaled up from 320240, not your original 800600 background. To get around it, set your doc window size the same as the image you plan to import as a background and don't change it after you've done the import. Also, the quality of the background image is important, so if you're creating the background in another app, make sure you save it as a bitmap or some other non-lossy image format. If you use a jpeg background, you can't help but lose some more detail every time you save it as a jpeg again.

Thanks for the help, that confirms a suspicion that I had about how Poser works. Although, I have to say that it sounds a very awkward way to work, especially if a huge background pic is needed. Surely it would have been better (and more consistent with every other program in existence) to make Poser so that it just either scales up or down a background pic at render-time, regardless of current viewport size?

Heh heh. Yeah, it sure would have been better for them to do it that way. I would post a suggestion about it in the SR2 beta forum but I think they're probably sick of seeing me pester them to fix old P4 bugs that are still hanging around in P5.

Her is a very good tut about this particular prob cheers

I lost this on the way !http://www.digitalskinz.com/tutorials/tutorials.htm

Thanks for the link, I'll give their ideas a try. Also noticed there was some other v. useful tutorials on this site so thanks again for the link.

One way I prefer to get around the strange dealings with using a background image, is to just a background 'plane' object and attach the pic to that as a texture. Then push the plane back in the image so it is behind your foreground items. Can be a problem with shadows being cast on the image though, so you need to tweak it depending on your scene. Then you can re-scale the background plane to whatever dimensions you like to make it show up nicely. If you use the background image feature, you either have to make your image the same size as the background, or else you get non-textured strips where it doesn't fit exactly.

i have the same problem. but what, if my background pic has 1000x1000 pixels or more? the solution would be: resize the working window to 1000x1000 too - but it's impossible to keep on working with that size ...

Well, if you want to use the background image approach, a quick and simple method is to make a reduced resolution copy of the larger image. So make a 500X500 pixel copy, and work with a 500X500 render size to get everything set up, and for the final render resize up to the 1000X1000 and load in the larger image. It means your working size has to be an exact ratio to the final desired size, which has to be the same as your background picture. If you use the background plane approach and attach the background image to that, then it doesn't really matter what resolution you want to use. You just have to make sure that the background plane has the same dimensions as the source background image. So for example, if you have a 653X798 pixel background image, then you load a background plane and set the xScale and yScale respectively to 653% and 798%, and the image will be displayed correctly. Then you can use the full object scale (the plane Scale dial,) to resize the pic/plane to fill the full back ground area depending on how far back you need to move it. For the background plane I usually just use either the square or one-sided-square that comes with Poser. If you have some type of morhing 'sheet' prop though, (or like to play with magnets,) you can get some interesting effects by warping the backgroud plane and thereby warping the backgroung image. Using this plane for the background, you also have the extra ability to move it around and 'crop' the background image to just the/a part you want. In fact, this is a LOT easier than trying to get it to exactly fill the background area of the image And just to run full circle on the whole issue, I usually use the background plane approach to get the background exactly where and how I want, then turn off everything else, (ie make then all invisible,) render just the background plane, then reload IT as the background image That way you wont get shadows falling on it. It does allow you to easily position and crop the background image to exactly where you want.

Good advice dke, but I wish CL would fix this so we didn't have to do all this messing around.