9.5.2

460 • CHAPTER 7
OBJECTS MENU • MANAGING YOUR ENVIRONMENT • 461
The background picture might be a landscape, into which your scene will t. For this you assign a
material, with the required texture in its color channel, to the Background object. These images will
be neither reected by your scene’s reective objects nor lit in any way by the scene. Nor will they
change with any change of camera settings. The background image will show through transparent
and refractive objects but will not change with altered camera settings. You could compare it to a
background layer generated by the Alpha Channel feature, on which the rendered image is then
superimposed.
As soon as you have applied a texture to a Background object, it will be shown in the viewport (taking
the Offset and Length values in the Texture tag into account). If this display distracts you may switch
it off by setting the object’s top visibility dot to red — i.e. click the dot until it turns red (you’ll nd
the visibility dots in the Object manager, just to the right of the object’s icon).
Any background picture is normally displayed in the 3D viewport only, so as not to distract you when
working in the planar views. However, attaching the camera to the view in any viewport will make
the Background object appear in all viewports for that view panel. Any background picture already
displayed will then be covered by the Background object’s texture. The picture must be loaded in the
material’s Color channel. If instead you load the picture into another channel such as Luminance, the
picture won’t appear in the viewport.
A CINEMA 4D object (the bridge) ts neatly into both a foreground and a background image (scene by
Joachim Hoff).
Foreground and background pictures can also be tiled. For this effect, use the Texture tag’s
settings.
Foreground and background pictures are scaled to the lm format during rendering. Transparent
sections of the background are ignored.
Animations and frame sequences can also be used for foreground and background pictures. In the
case of a Background object, these sequences will also be displayed in the viewport.