seamless background

[flying squirel]

Hi,

Ive been pulling my hair out trying to make the standard "review" scene where the ground plane blends seamlessly with the background so there is no horizon. I want this so i can have a generic scene for all of my models, with the standard white background.

I want a pretty much white scene but i also want the reflections and shadows from the models.

Ive tried a curved ground plane, object dissolve and everything else... why is this so difficult?

Someone please help....

[skywalker113]

Just make a huge white square plane. That is what I did for this shot.

[Sekhar]

Yeah, this is surprisingly complicated. AFAIK you can solve it in two ways.

The poor man's way is to crank up the diffuse on your ground so it becomes white. You'll get the shadow, but not the reflection. Make sure you have a black background, otherwise the reflection will wipe out the shadow.

A complete solution is a convoluted one I came up with using nodes. The basic idea is to:

Set the background to black
Add an image (any image) as background (Compositing tab), cranking up the brightness to white in editor (F6) if you want the background to be white
Use the Reflection node to get the reflection and then use its luminance as mask on a white background
Get the shadow using the Shadows node in DP Kit (free)
Mix the two and feed to Diffuse Shading

The beauty of this method is that:

It works with any background, not just white - all you need to do is add an image with front projection instead of white as background in the reflection mixer
A bonus is that you get soft shadows, even with boring lights like Distant

Below is the nodal map and an example scene. If someone has an easier way, please post.