Is there a way to make a static back drop image in Vue without having to make an object and painting it the image you want to use and enlarging it?

Not to sure what you mean? Sharen

Do you mean use an image instead of the sky for a background? I don't believe there is. You would have to map your image to a plane and adjust its position to fill the screen. Rich

Hi Lrdsatyr8; You can use of a picture for simulate the sky effects, if you work in a closed space (for example a sphe what you texturate with your picture, and you play with the transparency of the object for adjust the searched effects with your current sky and atmosphe) after, you create your scene into the sphe... i use of this for make my "space"scenes in Vue2.1(you can see the pictures on my gallery here, the "abstracts things" series...). Hope this, can help you. georges. :)

If I understand your question, you want to have a picture replacing the sky, don't you ? If so, here's the only way I see : Make an atmosphere with only one clouds layer. For this one, opend the material editor and reset it. Now, you can load a picture instead of a procedural mat. I don't have tested it, but I think this could work...

To replace the sky by an image, just creat a plane, map it with your image and that's it. You have to make the plane big anough to fill your background. Guitta

In order to use a bitmap image instead of the sky system in Vue, in most case it is bast to map the image to the inside of a large hemisphere rather than a plane, but both can work, it depends on 'focal length' of the camera, camera angle, the contents of the bitmap itself and so on.

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/viewed.ez?galleryid=156764&Start=13&Artist=LrdSatyr8&ByArtist=Yes

Well thanks all for the input. Was kinda disappointed to find this out thou. I mapped a plane with the image I wanted to use for the backdrop, but hte biggest problem with that is that it catches shadows and light and I didn't want that to happen at all. I wanted to make the scene I was working on merge into a picture. Gives it a much more photo-realistic look when you can model something into a photograph and make the rendering match the lighting and atmosphere of the photo itself until you can't tell the difference between what is real and what isn't. I was able to do this in Truespace by setting the background image to a photo. My original Lighthouse picture in my gallery (see link) was done this way. Saved a bunch of time in trying to get the perfect cloud or the right reflection on the water etc. In that pic, the entire background is a photograph... I mapped a plane with a high transparency and a good bump over the existing water in the photo to catch the reflection of the lighthouse itself. The rest was just matching the lightsource. I did see something about a background image in the options... does that do what I need to do?

Attached Link: http://www.multimania.com/arte/pic/hiver.jpg

You can do this in Vue 4 also. Have a look at this image I did in Vue 2, longtime ago. It is not a good image, I was in my beginnings:-, especially the legs of the horse (LOL). I used a plane for the background with a sky image projected on it. Then I added cloud spheres to create the dark clouds. You can do the same in Vue 4 easily. Guitta