Hi, I want to make some kind of animation that takes place high up in the air. So, if possible I would like to be able to just set some kind of landscape in the background (similar to the dynamic sky addon where I don’t necessarily need to be able to interact with it, but it’s there and feels large scale). Is there any way to do this, or will I need to start thinking about setting up an actual physical landscape (if so, any pointers on how that would work)? Thanks!
Maybe this … A.N.T. ?
Any suitable picture will do.
Render the animation with a transparent background and use an Alpha Over node in the Compositor to place it over the background image / video…
Standard CG shot.
if you only need one angle, or pretty limited angle change, an image plane would work. If the background doesn’t really need to move, but you want a 360 view, an aerial HDRI could do the trick.
I used a physical landscape for this; https://youtu.be/WJc-WuSuex8
It’s just a very big plane with a heightmap. Its far from perfect, but its in the background. Blender has difficulties with massive objects, so you might notice some weird artifacting. If I were smarter, I’d probably have uniformly scaled down the scene, and done something clever with the camera lens to keep it technically smaller, but still looking big. Or maybe rendered all the foreground elements at real scale, but then matched the camera, and changed the lens just for the background, and then add it in with compositing.
Oh - One more thing.
Large scale means fading away in the distance. You can use mist / particles or use transparent planes with a noise texture which fade to a darker blue color in the distance.
So even a small scene can be made to look huge.
Ended up going with NiklasWerth’s heightmap method, and then cleaned up the far-away parts with mist as Matakani suggested. Thanks for all your suggestions, I’ll have to look into them each in more depth later!