If you want some scenery outside your windows, what tricks do you use?

James

If you want some scenery outside your windows, what tricks do you use?

Until now I use HDRI, but HDRI is hard to control in my personal opinion. I can't move it around freely. Sometimes I ended up with curvy background images if I move it too much. Or the location just not good, like making the house like in the middle of the road, very near to unwanted object, etc.
 

SofaCitizen

Depending how much of the scenery is visible in the render you could always use a primitive pane with a photo or previous render applied as a surface. I've used that here and here for the stuff beyond the window in addition to several other practice pieces that never made it to public viewing.

WendyLuvsCatz

Cyclorama found in

Genesis 2 Male Starter Essentials

Genesis 2 Base Male
Multiplane Cyclorama beach scene
Phillip Character
Surfer Guy Beach Lights
Surfer Guy Beach
Surfer Guy Philip Texture
Lumberjack Hair
Lumberjack Outfit
Lumberjack Weapons
Lumberjack
Surfer Guy Outfit

• are many other often very cheap textures for it

TimberWolf

This is a job for a photo editing program. Photoshop is the obvious one but any of the decent free photo applications like paint.net will be able to do this.

1 - Get your lighting as you would like it in your full scene and then go to Render Settings. Set Draw Dome to Off. We're not interested in the view through the window at this point. Render your image and save it as a .png to preserve the transparency behind your windows.

2 - In a new scene load up your HDRI  or background scene and set it how you would like the image through your window to appear. Render that.

3 - Load each image into separate layers in your photo app with the first on top and voila....the lighting you want with the view you want.

Sven Dullah

I use to simply put some scenery outside my window! 

Dartanbeck

I render using the HDRI, but without showing the dome. Iray does an amazing job of keeping reflections and such on the windows yet leaving them transparent in the PNG.

Then I render what I want to see through the window in a separate render.

I do animations, so then I use my composite tools like PD Howler and DaVinci Resolve, etc., to put the layers together. I also render my characters individually like that too. Iray will also allow us to put reflections on the floor even if it's invisible (Draw Ground set on, but no floor in scene)

Taoz

I usually just apply an image to the built-in backdrop in DS, which is very simple.  The good thing about that is that it isn't affected by scene lighting.  The bad thing is that you can't adjust its position and other parameters from within DS (except for horisontal/vertical flip) if it doesn't look good right out of the box.