"Inexpensive" background scenery

[tica]

Need to generate background scenery, in this case low mountains with trees, that work in an animation. But I can't spend a lot of polygons to model them, as I have already plenty of polygons in my scene. Does anybody know a technique/plug-in that can give me a 360 degree backgound forest that is just an image? I've tried that with fotos I've taken at the site, and mapped them into my scene, but it's not good at all. Does anybody have a suggestion for this? I don't know if I've made myself clear...

[riki]

Maybe try Bryce, to gen a 360 bgd panorama image.

[jeremyhardin]

make your scenery.

use refgen to generate a panoramic image, then make the image a texture backdrop.

http://www.kolumbus.fi/erkki.halkka/plugpak/index.html

i've done this, then used radiosity on backdrop only to light the scene from the image. looks pretty good in the final.

[starbase1]

Something that might help if you want a really wide 'real' image is Panorama Factory, available from www.PanoramaFactory.com as a fully functional shareware download.

It's slow, VERY memory hungry, but superbly good at stitching together shots to make a panorama, with minimal effort.

Works best with digital cameras.

Nick

[tica]

I would like to add one more detail to this situation, as I think there might be other inexperienced users that may learn from this as well: What if you want to fly above the ground? What happens to your scenery? And even worse: How do I get lots of trees into the scenery - seen from above, like flying a helicopter at low altitude - without having to actually model the hills and planting zillions of trees that are going to make my animation impossible to render during my lifetime? I'm a bit desperate about this, and I understand that maybe I'm asking for too much, but has anyone had this kind of mission:impossible situation before?

JeremyHardin: I've downloaded the trial version, and I've found answers for many other situations, not only related to this project. Thank you for this link!

The other suggestions I am going to follow-up soon. Thank you both!

[ingo]

Hopefully your copter flys fast, so i would use the HD-instance plugin to put instances of 2D-trees into the scene. Of course you can delete the trees while rendering the animation when their out of sight.
Otherwise you might take a look at camera mapping, or in LW's language front projection mapping for some of your shots, as long as the camera is not moving that much.

HTH

ingo
www.im-graphics.com

[starbase1]

Ingo is right - if the helicopter is whizzing overhead, motion blur will sorty most of it out.

Bare landscape is pretty easy so start with that - Look for the free DEMSPACE plugin to import real world elevation data.

Water will add variety, but will whack your render time up a lot.

Gradients will be your friend when surfaceing this - make steeper slopes have more bump and roughness, apply a different colour to flatter areas, possibly snow...

To keep polys down, use a small chunk of land directly under the helicopter, and move the displacement map / texture past it.

From overhad moving fast, your trees mcould be very simple indeed, a few flat polys, with a clip map applied.

If you are REALLY lazy, and have plenty of memory, search the NASA web sites for their high res shots of earth from orbit - some of these are 4000 pixels on a side, and could be slid past in the background. Depends how much background blur you can get away with I guess... There are some great dramatic mountain shots, but it would opnly work if your hel;icopter was relatively high...

[txbob]

As for the Panoramic bkg plate, they work really well, but there can be a few issues using them. First, when you pan the camera around, you'll have trouble with the image plate forshortening, but there's a really quick and dirty trick to fix this.

Create a flat plane in modeler that is the same size as the image. Add 20 or 30 vertical segments. center the plate. Create a new morph map for the object. Bend the plate into a 180 degree or 360 it you can find a true panoramic image. You have to do this as a morph because if you try to apply the image onto the curved plate, the image will smear on the surface. (you could use cylindrical mapping and adjust your width wrap and image rotation, but morphing is quicker.) Center the object so the center of the arc is at 0,0,0. If it is a half circle you can use the "rest on ground" macro, set to z axis, and positive sence.

Load it, apply the image, and the morph. Adjust the image if needed, but it should fit right on. The camera should be reset to 0,0,0... and adjust the zoom factor if needed. You can now pan around the image and it works fine, and this doesn't add too much to render time.

BTW Set the object to 100 luma 0 diff, smooth and turn off image antialiasing on the image map panel.


Good Luck!