Backgrounds

[garystan]

      Hi everybody  :

                   Question :     How  "small"  does a background pic have to be,  in order to decently add to the project ?       I downloaded some  .jpegs.....1024x768.   With my photo editor I tried  "shrinking"  it .   Down to, around, 300x400.  And it still seems a little too large for a "decent "  background.    Does TFP automatically  enlarge it to  "size" ?       I noticed the dialog box where I can  unselect  "Tile" options  (vertically and horizontally), but wasn't sure what would be the  "max",  without screwing up the pic.

                                                                                                  garystan

[Allan Chesney]

Hi Garystan,

Physically making the image smaller will not reduce the size of the objects in the image on screen, probably all it would do is diminish the quality, as TFP will keep expanding it to fill the screen.

The only way to make the things in the image smaller is by making the scene bigger, not the image. For example - in your photo editor, if you take a copy of your scene and place it alongside itself, so you have two of it, the scene will appear to be half the size on the screen relative to your building.

If you look at some of the images already in TFP you can see that is what they have done, one half of the scene is a mirror image of the other and the bottom half of the scne is just grass or something. You have to be carefull doing this especially if there is a dominant feature in the scene - two of them may look wrong. If you know a little about photoediting it is easy to 'clone' a tree for example, make one bigger or smaller, or put a different one over another to hide the obvious duplications.

Whatever scene you choose needs to have the horizon across the centre of the view as all the forground, the bottom half of the image, will be underneath the terrain - in other words the image is almost square and most of the botton half is not seen, unlesss you move the camera so you see under the terrain. You can virtually take a wide scene and add blank space to the bottom half (third may be better), just fill it with grass or even just brown to represent the dirt under your building, so there is something under the terrain. This will make the horizon higher in the scene so it looks right relative to the terrain edge which is in effect the horizon in TFP.

Hope that helps and you can follow the idea.

Allan

[Doug.S]

To get the best understanding for your uses...experiment as you are very unlikely to break anything

Backgrounds can be of different resolutions depending on camera settings and camera position....i.e.how close are you to the objects in the scene? and how large of image are you rendering to?

Best to match the resolution of all images in a scene to the render in terms of ppi (pixels per inch)....under match and scene render will lose quality. Over match and files will be larger than needed.

Render a few scenes with different background resolutions and compare your results.  Let us know what you find and what conclusions you make.

[Allan Chesney]

Hi Garystan,

I just thought I would post the image below to illustrate the points I was making earlier.  You will notice that the 4 images with arrows are mirrored, some badly, with very obvious features showing quite conspicuously.  The last two are complete images, so they work better.

You will notice all have a high horizon with the bottom part of most just a repeat of the grass or whatever.  you may have to experiment to get the horizon in the right place depending on your image but just a fraction over half way up seems to work fairly well most of the time.

Allan