Noobie question- non-spherical backgrounds?

[Jackson_cg]

Normally I use 360º spherical 4000 x 3000 pixel backgrounds rendered out from Vue, but for the project I'm working on currently I need photographed trees in the very near background, around 10-15 metres from the camera ("photorealistic" tree models won't cut the mustard in this case). To do this I'd need to be using 8000-10000 pixel wide spherical backgrounds with very high-quality photographed trees carefully layered in in Photoshop. A much easier way (and way less of a RAM consumer on my already overburdened laptop) would be just to use a flat 2D photomontage background, at least the same size (and of course proportions) as my final rendered image. For the life of me I can't work out the environment editor settings for inserting a 2D background, no matter how much "repeat" I input it doesn't show up. Of course I could just insert it in post-processing, but I really need it to show up in reflections.

I'm sure I'm missing something really obvious, but it's been a long day and I'm a bit tired of fiddling with settings right now so if anyone knows the answer (something to do with angular environment maybe?) I'd be very grateful.

Thanks in advance,
Jackson

[dalomar_cg]

Re: Noobie question- non-spherical backgrounds?

Sorry for the delay, but I've been on vacation for a week....

Your not missing something. At the moment, this is not possible with VfSU. What you're looking for is something called camera projection, which we're looking to add in the next version. My suggestion for you at the moment would be to do your best to place the image (on a surface of course) in the scene perpendicular to the camera view that is properly oriented...that's at least the trick I use in Rhino.

[Jackson_cg]

Re: Noobie question- non-spherical backgrounds?

Thanks Damien (LOL, I knew you must be on holiday when I didn't get an answer within a couple of days!).

Glad to hear I'm not just missing something ridiculously obvious. In the meantime I'll look into streamlining the "background plane" workaround so I can get it working well with as little work on my part as possible.

Thanks again,
Jackson