Hi there

Is there any way to put a foreground image? (without creating a plane yourself)

Also it would be great to have foreground images in mplay.

Looking forward for this feature in future releases.

no. the only way would be to add it as a post render process in COPs (look at the render COP), or you can map a texture onto an image plane(Also of use here is the trace SOP).

mmm….I think that feature is quite basic and useful. It should be easy to implement it in future releases, isn't it?

Would be great to have it in mplay too.

thanks!

you can load a background image in mplay - File>Load Background

You can hit the d key in the viewport and load a background in the viewport as well.

if you want it to render you will have to create a plane with a texture. It's not that hard.

actually in h10 there is a new option on the camera, to load a background image, and it will render too.

Yep, but I mean a foreground with alpha.
It would be enough with a “depth” offset value in the background options

I think it is essential.Don't you think so?

In any real production, compositing is essential too.

Oh c'mon! ) 8)

I actually agree with you, onesk8man.

In a larger production pipeline, esp. in animation/layout/blocking, it's extremely common to have multiple layers (foreground, background, sometimes mid-ground layers too) visible in the viewport. Some of this is quite easy to build as OTLs which grab the camera transform and throw up a texture-mapped plane at a specified depth from Camera. It's very useful to have this support in the viewport because animators/layout people seldom need to render with anything more than a Flipbook; but it would be natural to support this in Mantra too.

Animators at R&H (in Voodoo) use a feature like this all the time, seriously. It's a fundamental tool for working with live action layers, and really useful because animators never want to render and comp anything - and especially for something so simple it's just an unnecessary slowdown.

While I do think an ImagePlane Object OTL can do this very easily, I also think that now that Mantra has support for Background Images, why does it have to only support ONE background image? I'd think that if this was a multiparm block of:

{
vm_backgroundimage## = “default.rat”
vm_backgroundimagedepth## = -1 # -1 is infinite depth for images without Z baked into a layer
}


And, naturally, the OpenGL Background Image should be able to render this too.

It might be great if the vm_backgroundimage feature could exist on several objects in the scene and Mantra should be able to pick up all of them. In this way an OTL could add one background plane each.