How to add a good background of any kind to a house
alex86fire
Posts: 1,130
Hi all,
I want to make a few renders of a house. In my case https://www.daz3d.com/modern-rustic-house .
I want to make it seem like it's belonging somewhere. A neighbourhood, a city, something.
I am unsure what kind of background to add so that it looks realistic, if a background is what it needs.
I tried with different HDRs but they all make it seem like the background is too big no matter how small I make the dome.
Any suggestions?
I added 2 renders, one with just the house, the second one also has the Haven Park added somewhere in the background but it still not enough :(.
I know there are backdrops but I haven't found one that looks good.
Or maybe a better option would be to add something in Gimp?
I would prefer not to have to build a whole 3d city behind my house in Daz to have a good background.
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Comments
Kitbash trees from some sets or use ones you already have, and move them closer to the house so they fill more sky area. Add another house on YOUR left behind that other house so only a portion is showing (and hide what isn't in the scene so it renders quickly.) There are fence products or grab a fence from a set. You can put things in the foreground which will also help with the illusion of a city block, and things in the foreground take up a lot of space and eliminate the need for a lot of background items. Some of the sets also have a lot of instances so you keep the polygons low. Those come in handy.
You can also use a photo as backdrop, if you can find one that matches.
If you are looking for trees, search your content for trees or forests, as you may find some from products you already own that you can use. One I've used as a background is EM - Aspen Billboards And Forests. For a buildings in the background, I've used the backgrounds contained within 1stBastions Neighbours: Front Drive scenes. These are billboards so have low memory use.
And if you use DOF, and you should, then it matters less that it matches.
Pixabay.com has tons of free stock photos with no restrictions you can use as backgrounds.
DOF doesn't work with the built-in backdrop in DS (which I was refering to), as the first render demonstrates - the car in the background is a 3D object and therefore blurred, but the backdrop photo is not. So if you want DOF you need to blur the photo in a graphics editor.
Using a plane as backdrop canvas can be tricky because it's being affected by the lighting, the DS backdrop is not which means you can focus on adjusting the lighting for the main objects, as the 3rd render shows. On the other hand, the photo needs to be sized according to the render size in the DS backdrop as it's being stretched to fit the viewport, a plane backdrop does not as it's not affected by viewport size. So both have their advantages and disadvantages.
As for matching, I also meant the color balance and general look and quality of the 3D objects and the photo, the beach house in the attached render doesn't quite match the background (which is not the best quality, just didn't have time to find something better), neither does the character in the other render.
Thank you all for the input.
I want it to look like a residential area.
I don't know if my renders are still there, as I can't see them but this happened to me in another post and other people could still see them.
I have plenty of trees if I need more for the background but I don't want to look like the house is in a forest or a park.
Ideally a few more parts of houses could be seen in the render (I only have one other that matches the style without being identical.
I would also like for some taller buildings to be maybe seen in the distance, like that's where the city center is or something like that.
My problem is consistency.
I am doing this for a visual novel and for now I want a few renders of the house from different angles, some would show more some less of what around it.
The story would take the protagonist to different areas of the city and I would like that to match somewhat with the image, that's why I added the park in the background, although I might have to move it a little.
I want there to be a park close to the house.
I have https://www.daz3d.com/urban-sprawl-3 , https://www.daz3d.com/city-streets and https://www.daz3d.com/city-office-block so I could theoretically build a city that could contain this house and have that as a backdrop but that sounds like a lot of work right now.
I will have to build the city in the end but I was hoping for later rather than sooner as that would take a lot of time from me now while I want to move further with the story.
I tried finding some HDRs and a few backdrops to add but nothing would really match the house or the look I wqas going for. Not as different as Taoz's second example, but not that far from it either.
I am now thinking if it wouldn't maybe be simpler to render the image as a png and add the background in Gimp (free photoshop type program).
Another option would be maybe to export my scene in Blender and try there some stuff, although not sure what.
You could build such a neighbourhood once, and then make a HDRI of it yourself.
How I'd go about such a thing: build a neighbourhood using the most suitable buildings and other environment you can find. Do include a HDRI for the sky as well, or use iRay sun with some nice clouds props and stuff.
Next, place some cameras at viewing height in the "house", you intend to use. One at ground level, and then one on each upper level as well. Make sure these cameras are oriented completely level, so all angles are 0 degrees. Set the cameras to spherical distortion.
Delete the house you intend to use for your renders. You want to render only the surroundings here, for your own HDRI, not the interior of your house. It was just there for orientation!
Render the thing as high-resolution beauty canvas from each camera. Do it multiple times if you need it for different times of day as well (morning, noon and night time seems logical)
I've explained a little bit more about rendering your own HDRIs here.
I might sometime render a couple of suburban HDRIs myself, I've already done a couple for a futuristic city with high-rise buildings. If I had created my own props from scratch to create those HDRIs, I might've considered releasing them somewhere/somehow, but since the buildings I used are from various PAs here, I just occasionally share them privately with friends who I know could use them. I wouldn't want to make the work of these PAs obsolete through their own products, if that makes sense? Though I do wish they'd consider making and releasing such HDRIs themselves, HDRIs from places like HDRI-haven and such are simply NOT ideal for many cases in Daz Studio. I think there's a huge untapped market for purpose-built HDRI environments.
While I do not have Modern Rustic House, I have two other complete houses that are PC+ and I put them into a scene, then added a park behind them and a filler grass piece and an SUV to block a pesky joint and a sky. I wanted to give you an idea of what you might do. But you might also try other styles, depending on the region your story is located in. For example southwestern flat roofs would not be good in a climate that has heavy snowfall and needs steep roofs. I used: https://www.daz3d.com/22-parker-road-bundle https://www.daz3d.com/modern-house-2-bundle https://www.daz3d.com/haven-park https://www.daz3d.com/g3d-da-grass-and-plant-pack and https://www.daz3d.com/upper-class-suv. I listed the bundles only to give the reference to the overall packages.