Hey folks, My animation is starting to come together now, but Im stuck on a scene which involves a plane flying over a cloud background. At the moment, I have a static jpg cloud image that I have imported into poser, however the image is larger than the render area, Im rendering the scene at 720 by 480. The static cloud image is muc larger, something silly like 2500 x 1800 - now I would have thought that when I specified the render size settings the whole of the cloud image would be shown. Instead the cloud image is all bunched up in the middle and the default backgound gray can be seen on either side. Im thought by changing the image size to match the render area in photoshop would help but I keep getting the same result. Anybody any ideas or am I just being thick?

I can't remember how to get round this - there is a way - but why not just comp the images in Photoshop after rendering?

Only problem is that its an avi that im rendering, not just a static or else that would have been my 1st point of call. Well I think I can say im thick, I just changed the static background image again in photoshop and it worked fine, however its a bit pixalated so I might try something else. Supposedly After Effects is good for taking out backgrounds as Ive seen afew tutorials on removing bluescreen so I may try rendering it with a blue background then remove it in AE instead. Chris

An alternative (possibly what Sam was thinking of): use a 1-sided square (rotated in x to be vertical) instead of the background? Set the square's dimensions to the same ratio as the cloud image using scale x/y, scale the square using the top, scale all) dial so that the square fills the bg, apply the cloud texture. You may have to push the square back in z (and re-scale larger) to avoid unwanted shadows...

Just a shot in the dark...
Cheers,
Diolma

Edited to add.. Once you get the square at the right size and distance, it might be worth resizing the clouds pic in PS (to the final size of the square) and re-applying it to the square. PS (and many other 2D apps) has/have better re-sizing algorithms than Poser does ('cos Poser isn't a 2d app, so doesn't have as much emphasis in these things).

Message edited on: 03/25/2006 16:10 Opps... major "forgot to say"... When applying the texture to the square, DON'T use diffuse. Use ambient. (set diffuse to black). Diffuse will react to lighting which you (probably) don't want. By using ambient(at full value) you get the colours, but no unwanted additional effects. It's probably best to turn off "cast shadows" for the square, too..

Message edited on: 03/25/2006 16:16

The problem comes from your 'max texture size' setting in the render settings box... you need to set this to the same dimensions as the longer side of your background image. Otherwise, it distorts it to fit into the default setting (1024, which is obviously too small for your clouds)... hope this helps. jonthecelt

Thanks, jon, I hadn't thought of that being a factor. One thing which I've found helps in P6 is to go into the Materials Room and go a bit indirect on the background. Set up the standard background color node as white, and then feed an ordinary Image Map into the color channel of that node. Don't use a Background Image node. That probably still has texture-size limits on resolution, but it gets around the distortion and awkward margins, and it's worked well for my web-resolution images. Background props in general can also work better by using Ambient Color instead of Diffuse -- it avoids shadows cast by foreground objects.