Background Pics

[The Rev]

Is there anything I can do to increase the "crispness" of background pics?  For example, I'm using an image of stars for a background, and while they are clearly white against black in the picture, they tend to be light gray against dark gray in the rendered fractal image, and the stars are kinda blurred blobs rather than clear points.

Is there an ideal image size that I should use?  Or format (is BMP better than JPG, for example)?

Thanks,

The Rev

[The Rev]

Well, I figured out one thing.  The Ambient Fog really obscures background images.  It's more like Ambient Smog in that sense.  If you set it to 0, you get clearer results.

The Rev

[Jesse]

The background pic covers the whole sphere, so you need the more resolution the lower your FOVy is for a sharp background.
And PNG or BMP is surely better for starlike shapes, also it is better to preblur the image to avoid artifacts from the linear
interpolation in m3d.

Besides the ambient fog, the "depth" setting makes the background vanish as well.


So if you dont want to make a video with background, it may be easier to assemble this in a seperate image editor with layers.
You can also save the ZBuf and use it as transparency for this reason...