Altering wraparound backdrops

[jdg2]

Having played around a little with backdrops, and found this to be a very valuable tool in designing rooms and an entire house, I was curious about if something is possible. I stiched together photos shot in 360 degrees from the likely house location, and imported this into my houseplan in HDPro 8. So far so good. I then made this giant bitmap a wraparound spherical backdrop visible in a 3d overview, so walkthroughs of the planned house would accurately reflect real world views out the windows. But the problem I noted is that this wrapped around view seems to center on the coordinates 0,0 and has a fixed radius which seems to not even extend out to where the house lies on the terrain. The backdrop ends up intersecting the house so views out the windows are distorted in most cases, and non-existent in others. Is there a way to adjust the center of, and radius for, the spherical backdrop view? Since the 3d renderer obviously must have some defined value to do the rendering, is there a way to set them to something else, so the backdrop actually wraps around the house, and is centered on it? Being able to do this would be an incredible value for this program.

A related question for those who have used HDPro for entire house projects: Does it make sense if you are designing a house to go an a large acreage, to do the landscaping and land use planning in a separate .plan file than the actual house design, or should the detailed house design be done together, so that views from the house will reflect the real landscaping.

Thanks in advance,

JD

[Cindy24]

JD,

Congratulations on your success w/ backrounds so far. You are far more advanced than I, so I can not help you there.

On large sites, I find it much more managable to use 2 plans; 1 interior, 1 exterior. I do the house, making sure all the exterior elements are as I like. Then, I make a copy, delete all the interior walls and details and proceed with my terrain. This makes the files smaller and the renderings faster. However the views out the windows of the interior plan are not quite accurate because they have none of the landscape detail.

I prefer to make slide shows rather than walkthroughs so to show the view from a particular window, I just place the camera outside the window in my exterior plan.

Best of luck with your project!