in other apps .the background image appears in your final render by defaoult……and u can even have enviroment maps appear as the background of your render….is there any way to achieve this in houdini?

In the camera, View tab, Background image…

Cheers,

J.C.

ok….thanx that solves one problem….what about enviroment maps?….could i hav them appear in the render?

Add an Environment light and reference the env map on disk in the Environment Map parameter.

ok…sorry…im a total newb…iv added the enviroment light……i cant seem to find a enviroment map parameter……i refence what where?

Select the Environment Object.
Look at the parameters for that Object.
In the Light tab, third parameter down from the top is the parameter called:
Environment Map
Press the right hand file browser icon and find your environment map on disk and accept.

oh…thanx….that parameter is in h11 only…i was using 10…thats why i didnt see it…..let me just take this opportunity to say thanx to all u proz who take time to help newbies……..

Ahhh H10.

Same Environment Map Light but the map is in the Area Light Options. You have to enable the “Use Area Map” option then specify the Area Map.

H11 re-jigged a lot of these settings/parameters to make it easier to do image based lighting.

Yo,im sorry…this doesnt seem to work…all this does is light my scene using the enviroment map…….what i wanted to do was….have an image appear in the background(the part of my render that is is currently black)….in carrara puuting an image in this way…results in ur scene looking like u mapped ur enviroment map on the inside of a big sphere that encompasses ur scene…its kind of like u mapped ur image on the sky……and so rotating ur camera has ur image behaving accordingly…do u see what i mean…….

The light tab on the environment light has a parameter called “Render Light Geometry”. When you check this you environment map will render.

I think I had the same problem. I rendered my images as .JPG's and it worked perfectly. A .PNG does not render the background. Otherwise you can composite it in After Effects also.
Thanks