Simple Carrara background question ^^

eponica

Whew! I'm back... After nearly losing the house to the worst flood anyone's ever seen around here :P

OK, so despite the fact I still have major butterflies, I'm taking up Carrara again, which I haven't been able to play with in almost a week. I am having trouble finding the control to change the background settings. My backgrounds are rendering as a flat color, the sky has sunlight but no clouds, and when I try to add a background image it shows correctly in the 3D view but not on the finished render.

Please, good folks, can someone point me to the relevant control? I want to show the background in the final render. I've been picking through the Preferences, the Interactive Render Settings, and am now going over the Render Room controls again...

I have tried to follow some sky and background tutorial links listed in this forum but got 404's.

Thanks very, very much in advance... ^^;

EDIT: No luck with the regular "Sky" but the Realistic Sky is now working if I uncheck the ground plane option. I will experiment more with background vs. backdrop tomorrow :)

WendyLuvsCatz

do you have alpha channel accidentally ticked in render settings?

eponica

Nope ^_^

Nice guess, though, I hadn't thought of that one ^^; Also I am using the right camera, which the documentation does mention makes a big difference.

I think I'll set everything back to default. I've been romping through Carrara rather wildly and with a whole lot of outside distractions, and most likely I just fouled something up that there is no button for :)

WendyLuvsCatz

Ok, you are using backdrop not background as you can see the preview image
the latter is only visible in render and stretched 360 around like a sphere
have you got more than one camera and selecting an unsupported one like isometetic in render? Not likely but worth asking
is something blocking the view which is not visible in preview? Usually faint text in scenetree.
Have you a light obscured by a skydome or something that does not have shadows recieved and cast unticked?
A screensgot of your settings and what is in the scene will help a lot.

eponica

Thanks so much for the help, Wendy! ^_^ I greatly appreciate it. I know most folks are very busy this time of year.

This is my first Carrara project/experiment-- I'm trying to make a female Sasquatch holding a kitten she's rescued :) I have the backdrop/background figured out, seemingly, and have managed a render with a backdrop included. So I turned those features off and would like to focus in on the Sky problem. The issue is that no clouds are showing in the Sky.

This the plain Sky, not the Realistic one, and the settings are shown in the two attached screenshots. As you can see I have several layers of clouds ticked in this Sky, yet it is rendering as plain blue. The cameras I am using are conical and not isometric though I am unclear if this makes a difference with the Skies or just the backdrops. Maybe it's something in those Sky settings?

EDIT: I should mention that in the Scene tree, under Base 01, Light One (sunlight) Was greyed out until I clicked on it.

I temporarily made the ground plane bright pink so I could see if it was causing the problem; apparently it is not. That is its reflection on the objects :)

WendyLuvsCatz

I can see now what the issue is
it is the default setting for basic sky which are pretty useless unless rendering a flea on a mouse by a toadstool!!
SURROUNDED BY CLOUDS
Look at that horizon and height
3 meters
set the horizon to - 50 and height to 200 meters for a start!
Also untick the fog/haze that is on by default unless wanted.

Oops yours is scarier as in feet, make that an amoeba on a dust spec

eponica

Ah, thank you so much! That one was staring me in the face and I went right on by %-P

We have clouds!! Now I will play with the lighting.

This has been a great Carrara session. It really got my mind off the floods. Thanks a bundle! :)