render the imageplane in the BG

[bhaveshpandey]

I'm pretty confused about how would i render a particular scene along with the viewport's imageplane in the BG

of all the geometry??

i looked in the Mantra render node but could not figure it out..

i figured a manual way(which probably is quite common) by throwing in a grid and applying the Image as a texture to it but the idea seems to be pretty crude for this current scene

as i'm using a 3D tracked camera in the scene..

any tips here??

thanks a lot

[brianburke]

Hey man. I don't know how to render the plane in the background, but it would be pretty straightforward to set it up in COPs to layer your render over your image sequence. Does that work?

[anamous]

There is AFAIK no option to render out the backplane. BUT you can put any image or image sequence in mplay's background (with correct alpha compositing), simply by pressing "d" somewhere in the mplay window, which opens the display options (as it does almost anywhere in Houdini), and then from the "background" tab, choose an image/sequence.

cheers,

Abdelkareem

[symek]

I'm pretty confused about how would i render a particular scene along with the viewport's imageplane in the BG

of all the geometry??

i looked in the Mantra render node but could not figure it out..

i figured a manual way(which probably is quite common) by throwing in a grid and applying the Image as a texture to it but the idea seems to be pretty crude for this current scene

as i'm using a 3D tracked camera in the scene..

any tips here??

thanks a lot

AFAIK there is really rare need to do that. Most of us compose renders with background image after rendering. Personally for these rare cases I use fog shader. See basic example.

cheers,

skk.

PS One minor thing is that it seems VOPs doesn't support texture node in Fog context, but colormap only, which doesn't filter a texture. This is only Vops limitation, and one can easily use texture() in code to filter background if needed (which is not, btw, what you usually want, since you don't want to degrade your plate while filtering. Yet another reason to not to render with background Did I contradict myself..?).

background_shader.hip

Edited February 12, 2009 by SYmek

[bhaveshpandey]

thanks for the reply guys..

i basically wanted to see my BG plane along with the geo matchmoved over it for just visualization purposes..

all the ideas out here are great..

@SYmek great tip..would keep it in mind next time

@ anamous.. this is exactly what i needed..thanks buddy..

@ brianburke again this is a nice work around..but i just needed a way to visualise without spending too much time setting up a cop network

thanks a lot guys for the time

cheers