Now-Scene (think now-crowd with objects)

pixelquack

Often enough I have an indoors scene in a room in a building and outside is the clear blue sky or an hdri that moves and morphs in the most awkward ways as soon as I change the camera for the next shot in a storyline.

So something that combines "Parallax Backgrounds", "Iray Windows Lights" and "Now-Crowd Billboards":

Have a look at the attached concept: top half is from KindredArts' "Parallax Backgrounds", bottom half illustrates the idea: instead of one circular object with a texture have individual billboards with:

homes, industrial buildings, office buildings, trees, bushes, street items, cars, vans, bikes, people and whatnot. 

Place a center point item in the scene in the room, then add billboard items to the outside world, then run a script that does the following:

rotate all selected billboard towards the center point, calculate the required scaling from the distance. 

If you need to reposition single items rerun the script for only that item.

System would be highly extensible as one could simply add more themes (scifi, medieval, fantasy, whatever) 

A terrain dropper could be added where you start with a large plane of .. soil, grass, rock, desert etc,, then place item planes (stretch of road, crossroads, walkways, pathways...) as large plane itmes and simply compose via dforce or manually stack above one another. 

That way one could compose entire surroundings in relatively short time individually adapted to the scene, and still even add regular items.

pixelquack

Scratch the "from Parameters" thing, it would need to calculate distance from the center point, cannot have this as a Parameter if the billboard is arbitrarily placed.