Every now and then, I stumble across a feature in 3ds max that I’ve never seen before, or known how to use. Today, I found one of them and I can’t wait to share it!
I have been using Corona for a while now, and one of the features I wished it had was an ‘infinite’ ground plane, like Vray does so that I can have endless terrain that meets the horizon, such as you would need in a desert scene, or a view looking out to sea. Up until now! I have discovered a cool feature hidden away in 3dmax basic primitive plane settings – which means that this will work with any renderer. There is a magic setting that allows you to multiply the scale at render time – see below for examples.
Here is just a basic plane with no special settings. The mapping is set to real world scale. But what if I want the plane to reach the horizon? How big do I have to make it – and then I would have a massive piece of geometry in my scene that I don’t want.
Here, I have set the render multiplier to 1000, and it has effectively created an infinite plane! Happy days! And the mapping is still correct since is uses real world scale. There was a slight shift in the mapping origin between this and the original, but the scale is correct.
Yay!
Hey Karen
Thanks for the tip, I just moved over to Corona and was lamenting the lack of a Vray plane.
You’re welcome Hugh! Glad it’s helped 🙂
Great tip. Although when I try this with fog in the environmental slot I get a black gradient in the horizon. I am using a hdri instead of corona sun/sky. Any idea how to get rid of the black or make it like white a fog or look more realistic? Thanks
Hi Matt!
Thanks for the comment. Are you using an HDRI that has a black lower half? That could be the problem – maybe try to mirror the environment in photoshop first, so that if there is a small amount of the hdri visible below the actual horizon (the scale setting on the plane doesn’t make it an infitite distance, so it doesn’t technically go all the way to the horizon)
Otherwise, I’d play with your fog settings, maybe the absorption colour.
Hope that helps!
Cheers,
Karen