i have made a tileable cloud map and inserted it into the environment slot. i then dragged the map into the material editor, turned off real world scale, and set it to environment spherical mapping.

my question is, when i hit render, the reflections look great but the background is too zoomed in, how can i get the background to zoom out so the clouds look further away?

any ideas would be great.

3ds Max Design 2010/11/12, 64bit, Boxx technologies, dual quad core 2.8, nvidia quadro 4000, 20GB Ram, use mental ray for rendering, windows XP pro 64bit

i am trying to attach an image.

3ds Max Design 2010/11/12, 64bit, Boxx technologies, dual quad core 2.8, nvidia quadro 4000, 20GB Ram, use mental ray for rendering, windows XP pro 64bit

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That background doesn’t look bad. But when you set the map to spherical it’s a 360 image and the camera only sees a small section of those 360 degrees, equal to the camera’s FOV. your options are, tile the image so it is repeated, use a hi-res 360 sky light probe photo, or use the mr environment/background switcher to use one pic for the environment and another photo of your choice for the background.

thanks for the reply, i am trying to get a nice background that can be used in future animations where the clouds apear to be smaller and further in the distance. i tried the background switcher but when using a background image for the background and a spereical map for reflection and the camera moves, the clouds stay the same no matter what angle i view them at.

right now i tried the skys in the MR Physical sky hase slot so the sun will affect the coloring of the clouds as well. i am using the background switcher with the MR Physical sky in both slots but one hase map is set to screen for the background and the other is set to sphereical for the reflections. but i would like to rotate camera and have the clouds not stay the same in the background plate.

what aspect ratio do you suggest using when creating a background sky so the clouds appear further away?

3ds Max Design 2010/11/12, 64bit, Boxx technologies, dual quad core 2.8, nvidia quadro 4000, 20GB Ram, use mental ray for rendering, windows XP pro 64bit

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I’d suggest simply mapping the clouds onto a curved faraway mesh. Then you can precisely control how they’re seen. The reflections can still be controlled separately.