Hm. I wanted to refine the figure-model on my new MacBook Pro, which I 
intended to buy today. But Apple has shipping troubles currently and I 
have to wait till the store gets a new shipment... No idea when that'll 
be. So I didn't work on the model yet, but still wanted to share the 
latest change on the background.

It's just a simple heightfield with a green/gray pigment-mapped crackle 
texture to texture-fake paths on the distant hills. The signs are 
"light" version of the ones in the foreground, just randomly bunched and 
placed on the background heightfield.

Note that the background (sky and background mountains) are rendered in 
a seperate scene and the resulting image is just placed behind the 
foreground.

One thing to keep in mind on that technique: The background image is a 
certain distance to the focal-plane, so I have to adjust it's position 
if I want more or less blurring (and scale it slightly larger than the 
viewing area, or blurred rays will miss it and I get a sky-colored edge 
around the background where it isn't obscured by the foreground).

The advantage to rendering the background seperately: I can render it at 
half the resolution with good antialiasing settings, because after the 
blurring I wouldn't retain all that detail anyways. Thus I save 
rendering time double-fold: smaller resolution & no complicated 
100-samples-per-pixel focal-blurred media.

I'll work on the figure-model tomorrow or sometime this week. On my 
desktop PC. Running Windows. Not a new Mac. *sigh*

Regards,
Tim

-- 
aka "Tim Nikias"
Homepage: <http://www.nolights.de>

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