Backdrops

Cross22

Basically I am looking for best practices when rendering larger outdoor scenes.

I am fine with creating indoor scenes, but outdoors are posing a problem. I have tried using the Millennium environment backdrops but those don't work well when going for a wider angle. I can avoid this by using a skysphere. But most textures I have come across so far seem to be of low resolution causing the sky to be pixelated. The other major issue I run into is the obvious discontinuity between the backdrop (blurred, maybe different color scheme) and my foreground objects.

What are the recommended approaches? Do I always have to use Depth of Field to blur the edges? Is it better to add the backdrop in post-processing? Use a volume camera to add more haze?

Steven-V

After much struggling with this, I have found that I really prefer to add the background of an outdoor scene in postwork whenever possible. This poses its own challenges, as you have to make sure you get the lighting of the image correct so that it "matches up" with the lighting of the outdoor image. And of course, you need a backdrop scene to be available to you so you can add it in postwork. But most of the time what I have done is render the whole thing as a png with a blank/transparent background, and then overlay the scene in photoshop atop the background. This generally looks fairly good, although sometimes, depending on the lighting scheme, one can discern a faint outline around the object.

My former profile pick of Supergirl was done this way. She was rendered in DAZ and then I used a free sky background from CGTextures to put in the sky. It took some tweaking to get it right -- fortunately I had the cover of an old Supergirl comic to use as reference for the lighting and position of the sun (a somewhat-famous cover by Amy Reeder).

So, I definitely like this method, if (and it is a BIG "if") one can find the right photograph, with the necessary usage rights, to use in the background. Which is not always possible.