background color in rendering

[vmaranta]

How can I change the background color when rendering? I tried to render an object and the background is preset to black,,,,,,,can I change it to different color? I just figured this one out yesterday. On the left side under the render panel at the very bottom under Pass , click on edit then current pass. In the property sheet that comes
click on the Outout Shaders tab. Click on the Add button, dbbl click 2D_background_color. Once you get it in the Output Shader Stack, click once on the name to highlight it and then Click the Inspect botton. Pick your color and render away.
Hope this helps.
Vince

[TiSOy]

Wow,,,,,Thank u very much,that works...

[madheavy]

Hey Thanks alot man! I am trying to work my way thru the tutorials in XSI, and it didn't go over changing background color to make a synoptic view! Many thanks

[sadde]

yes but beware its just a "post" effect. which means when you render it will antialias on black again.:(
It just changes the bg color after the rendering finishes.Which you can easily do yourself in a compositing program.

[EdHarriss]

- Yes, you are better off compositing a new background than using that shader.
- Unless you are just doing some tests.

[JoeW]

Another way to do this so that the background color shows up in the render is to use the Toon_Ink_Lens shader on your camera. To do this, open the property page on your camera, go to the Lens Shader tab, click on Add, pick the Toon_Ink_Lens shader from the explorer window, click on "Toon_Ink_Lens" in the window (Camera property page Lens Shader tab) - and click on the "Inspect" button. In the property page that opens, go to the Advanced tab, and check the box that says "Require Host" - then go to the Background tab and check the "Enable" box (then choose your background color). The "trick" here is that you are requiring a host shader for anything to have toon lines - so if you have regular shaders on your objects, they won't render toon shaded, but the lens shader will still control the background color.

This will effectively kill off your alpha channel, but if you want a render with a background color without having to composite it in later, this is a technique that will work for you.

JoeW

[mstram]

Yikes !

As an XSI newbie, I really do appreciate all the info and tips about toon shaders, background dialogs etc .... but ...

I just created a sphere big enough to enclose the scene and changed the diffuse color of it :)
Fortuneately it seems the default is to apply the diffuse color "double sided", so I didn't have to
go looking for that option ... yet :)

.... Now I'm trying to figure out how to apply a texture to it :) :) :)

Mike

[JoeW]

Yikes !

As an XSI newbie, I really do appreciate all the info and tips about toon shaders, background dialogs etc .... but ...

I just created a sphere big enough to enclose the scene and changed the diffuse color of it :)
Fortuneately it seems the default is to apply the diffuse color "double sided", so I didn't have to
go looking for that option ... yet :)

.... Now I'm trying to figure out how to apply a texture to it :) :) :)

Mike

This is a viable option if you want a textured background, but also it can be troublesome when you get your lights into the scene and start casting shadows and that kind of thing8. You end up spending a little bit of time excluding lights, shutting off shadows, etc - so no matter what, you end up poking around in property pages and what not - definitely not as simple as some other packages. There are also environment shaders - but they're a bit more trouble than they're worth IMO.

You might think about a couple of things if you are using a sphere as a background - number one is to flip the normals on the sphere since by default they'll be pointing the wrong direction (in XSI, if you're using a polygon sphere the command is "Invert Polygons" - don't ask me why - and if you're using a surface sphere the command is "Inverse Normals") - the other thing is to possibly use a Constant material instead of a Phong or Lambert. Constant materials "ignore" shadows and lights - so with a nice sky texture and some tweaking, they can look pretty good.

JoeW

[mstram]

This is a viable option if you want a textured background, but also it can be troublesome when you get your lights into the scene and start casting shadows and that kind of thing8. You end up spending a little bit of time excluding lights, shutting off shadows, etc - so no matter what, you end up poking around in property pages and what not - definitely not as simple as some other packages. There are also environment shaders - but they're a bit more trouble than they're worth IMO.

You might think about a couple of things if you are using a sphere as a background - number one is to flip the normals on the sphere since by default they'll be pointing the wrong direction (in XSI, if you're using a polygon sphere the command is "Invert Polygons" - don't ask me why - and if you're using a surface sphere the command is "Inverse Normals") - the other thing is to possibly use a Constant material instead of a Phong or Lambert. Constant materials "ignore" shadows and lights - so with a nice sky texture and some tweaking, they can look pretty good.

JoeW

Joe,

Thanks very much for more "inside" information :)

I'm looking at the cloth demo scenes, which both have "sky spheres", and I'm trying to see how the spheres / textures were constructed.

Hmm, inverse normlals .... maybe that's why the texture I applied to my skyshere wasn't showing up <g>.

I noticed that the "inverse normal" operator was applied to the sphere. I turned it off, and even deleted it just to see what difference it made but the sphere still renders with the texture ???

I'll dig into, later, for now, I can just copy that sphere into my scene :)

Mike

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