Background and Camera Settings
The 3D View window shows the scene by default against a flat dark gray fill. To make the preview look like a nighttime shoot of the object, you can turn on a sky panorama behind the scene, dim the brightness of the geometry, and adjust the glow of the fixtures. This is also where you set the visibility bounds — the distances nearer and farther than which the camera does not render anything. All these settings are shared for the whole scene and are stored in the project.
Where the Settings Are Located
- Open the 3D View window.
- In the toolbar, select Select and Move.
- Left-click an empty spot in the scene to deselect all objects.
The Properties window will show the scene settings in four groups: Background Texture, Colors, Camera, and Lighting. Any value is applied immediately, there is no separate confirm button.
As soon as you select any object in the scene, the Properties window switches to its parameters. To return to the scene settings, click an empty spot again.
The settings belong to the project: they are saved with it, each project has its own, and a new project starts with default values.
Sky Panorama
The Background Texture group is responsible for enabling and choosing the background.
| Parameter | Purpose | Default |
|---|---|---|
| Enabled | Show a sky panorama behind the scene | Off |
| Texture | Which of the five built-in panoramas to show | Evening_sky1 |
| Rotation | Rotation of the panorama around the vertical axis, in degrees | 0 |
There are five built-in panoramas:
| Name | What's in it |
|---|---|
| Evening_sky1 | Overcast evening: solid layered clouds, a narrow warm gap of sunset at the horizon |
| Evening_sky2 | Clear dusk: a bright yellow-pink sunset band above a ridge of hills, deep blue sky above |
| Evening_sky3 | Late dusk: an almost even dark blue sky and a thin warm band right at the horizon |
| Evening_sky4 | Dense blue dusk with large clouds and a point of the setting sun at the horizon |
| Starry_sky1 | Night: starry sky with the Milky Way |
All the panoramas are evening and night ones — glowing fixtures would be almost invisible against a daytime sky.
Rotation rotates the panorama around the vertical axis without touching the scene or the camera. This lets you bring the sunset or the gap in the clouds to where it looks best — for example, turning the sky so that its bright part ends up right behind the facade of the object.
Useful things to know about the background:
- The panorama is mapped on the inside of a huge sphere whose center always coincides with the camera. You cannot fly toward or away from the background — it behaves like a real horizon and never occludes scene objects.
- The bottom half of each panorama is dark, almost black "ground." If the camera looks down at the object from above, this is what ends up in frame; to get sky in the frame, lower the camera closer to the object's level.
- The background is only rendered in perspective views — in Perspective and in project cameras. Flat views (Top, Front and others) don't have it; they keep the flat fill. More about views — see Switching Views and Cameras.
- The panorama does not light the scene: it has no effect on the color of models and fixtures, it's only a backdrop.
- The background also appears in the GIF preview if the preview is captured from Perspective or from a project camera (see Настройки GIF превью).
Background and Object Brightness
The Colors group. Both parameters set a shade of gray as a number from 0 (black) to 1 (white).
| Parameter | Purpose | Default |
|---|---|---|
| Background Color | The fill the scene is drawn on where there are no objects and the sky panorama is not enabled | 0.14 — dark gray |
| Object Color | Overall brightness of the geometry lighting: models, shapes, fixture housings | 1 — full brightness |
Background Color is what's visible around the scene. A value of 0 gives a black backdrop — this produces the most contrasty shots with glowing fixtures. Values closer to 1 make the background lighter, making it easier to make out dark geometry while placing fixtures. The sky panorama covers this fill, so with the background enabled the background color remains visible only in flat views.
Object Color reduces the light with which the camera illuminates the scene. Lower the value and the model darkens down to a black silhouette, leaving only the glowing pixels of the fixtures visible against it. This is a common technique for showing an animation to a client: the object is still recognizable, but all the attention goes to the light. This parameter does not affect the fixtures' own glow or the sky panorama.
Glow
The Lighting group controls the halo around bright pixels — what makes the image look like a shot of real illumination.
| Parameter | Purpose | Default |
|---|---|---|
| Glow | Enables the halo around glowing pixels | On |
| Intensity | Strength of the halo, a value from 0 to 2 | 1 |
A value of 1 gives the usual glow. Closer to 0 the halo fades away and only the pixels themselves remain — convenient for recounting fixtures and checking the layout. Above 1 the glow becomes brighter and wider, and merges into a solid glowing line for densely placed pixels.
The glow is visible not only in the window but also in the GIF preview and the exported video, so it's best checked from the same view you'll use to shoot the preview.
Camera Visibility Bounds
The Camera group sets two bounds shared by all views and all project cameras: anything nearer than From and farther than To is not rendered by the camera. Values are specified in scene units — the same ones used for object coordinates and sizes.
| Parameter | Purpose | Default |
|---|---|---|
| From | Near visibility bound | 100 |
| To | Far visibility bound | 3,000,000 |
The default values cover any real object with margin, so you usually don't need to change them. It's worth checking here in three cases:
- Distant parts of the scene disappear as if clipped. Increase To.
- When flying close up, the object disappears or gets clipped through. Decrease From. Do not set it to zero — the image will break; use a small positive number instead.
- Surfaces flicker and show through each other. This is caused by too large a spread between From and To. Increasing From helps: the near bound affects image precision noticeably more than the far one.
The sky panorama is rendered independently of these bounds and will not disappear no matter what To is set to.
Do not confuse the visibility bounds with the parameters of a specific camera — Field of View and Focal Length. These are set per camera individually, described in the Switching Views and Cameras article.
If the Background Is Not Visible
- Check the Enabled checkbox in the Background Texture group — the background is off by default.
- Check the current view: the background is not rendered in flat views, switch to Perspective or a project camera.
- If the frame is solid black, the camera is looking into the panorama's "ground." Lower the camera to the object's level or turn it toward the horizon.
What Else Affects the Scene View
Besides the scene settings, the image in the window is also changed by the toggles in the View → 3D View menu:
- Show Grid (key G) — floor grid of the scene. It's usually turned off before showing the client or shooting a preview.
- Auxiliary 3D Objects (key F4) — camera and projection icons, spline lines.
- Model Wireframe (key F3) — geometry is drawn as an outline instead of filled.
- Show 3D GIF Bounds (key F5) — frame of the future GIF preview.
Navigating the scene is covered in 3D Navigation, views and cameras — in Switching Views and Cameras.