I am using P6. I try to use a night sky picture as a background, moon shining over a few clouds etc. The 'BG picture' node accepts this, but any change in the setting (autofit off, u- and v- offset to get the moon in the correct position, and 'background color' to fill up the area not covered by the picture) are not reflected in the document window and are discarded as soon as I leave the material room. What do I do wrong?

The Background pic is exactly that: a fixed background that replaces the "grey screen" (or whatever) that Poser renders over. (I think. I may be wrong, but 'cos of additional problems with background pics, I never use them these days...)

What I do instead is load a single-sided square, size it to the same proportions as the pic I intend to load onto it, apply the pic, then send the square waaaay back in Z. Then I use the scale dial (the top one, not scale x etc.) to get the square+pic to fill the screen..
Oh, and I apply the pic using the AMBIENT channel (at value 1, colour white) and set the diffuse to 0... that way it's not affected by lighting etc..

With a little ingenuity, you can use this technique to do what you require (since the u- and v- offsets will now work) :-))

Cheers,
Diolma

(Just be careful to send the image far enough back so it doesn't get shadows cast on it)
Edited to add: and turn off specularity etc. Sheesh! I'm so used to doing this I forget to mention things..

Message edited on: 11/12/2005 16:16

You would be better to switch off cast shadows for the background plane, too.

Thank you both.

I had used that workaround before but images do not show up during posing, only during render.
In this case the background is important for the pose, so I wanted to use the background shader so I could see the background while posing.

OK, where is that start button for Photoshop?

In any case, thank you for responding,

B.

Message edited on: 11/13/2005 02:06