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Is the fog on very high?  Sometimes it covers up to BG  image

Hi again,

If you want to add a background picture in M3D, you may not be able to see it due to needing certain jiggery-pokery with the fog settings – as has been stated. Maybe the simplest way of practising this is to load up the default bulb. Then go to the background picture tab on the lighting box. If you want a ‘pure’ background picture, then turn off ‘as a full background sphere’ and 'scale rows to geographic projection'. Load in a picture of your choice and voila! It’s not there. Go to the ambient tab and reduce the ambient fog depth to zero. Press 'Calculate' in main window. Your background picture should now be there to see.

Fiddle further with the ‘ambient’ slider and you will see that this has no real impact on the background but will impact upon the bulb.
Fiddle with the dynamic fog and you will see that some impact is made on the background (depending upon where you have the depth set) but, depending upon which way the slider is, there will potentially be either a dark or a light hue in and around the bulb.

With fog offset, you can either completely bleach or black out the entire picture, including both background and bulb. Oh, and you will probably have to wrestle with reducing the Far Plane in the Navi drop down window to bring the picture into view on some 'diffcult' ones where simply turning the fog depth down does not quite do it.

Now for the ‘interesting’ bit. Most people will add a background picture and leave it as just that; a static background picture. But what you have with the bulb and the background is effectively a layer - a fixed and static layer - but I layer nonetheless. So, what you could do is get a dynamically moving background if you have the time and inclination to use a different picture for each frame.

So, keeping it simple, what you could do is, say, have the bulb rotating and getting bigger/smaller whilst travelling down a tunnel. For this, you would need to create a series of tunnel ‘backgrounds’ with some movement by creating, say, 20 subframes out of two keyframes. Generate your mini animation. Each subframe then becomes the background picture for each subsequent frame. Load in subframe one as your background and do something to the bulb. Recalculate. Save this as a picture. Load in subframe (background) two (you have to untick and retick the 'use an image' box), and then do something to the bulb - save this is a picture... And so on... maybe used only for a 'special' moment as it is quite time-consuming.

If you put these 'frames' into a set of new anim keyframes, then something different happens; the ball will still move around (much more smoothly than you doing it yourself) but the background does not step to the next background at each keyframe and so the background remains static. This is possibly why you generally see static backgrounds.

You now have the opportunity to use your new series of pictures with bulb as new backgrounds for even more foreground activity and, whilst people who do not know the program may be amazed, those who do know the program, may well wonder how you did it - unless they've seen this tip. I hope to see numerous multilayered dynamic animations in coming weeks folks.

regards
kam