I love 3d canvas, its very easy to use and gives me lots of options with a simple interface. I recently have been trying to get into the texturing and animating part of it.

The animating seems easy enough, I made a clip where one of my space ship models flys across the screen and towards a planet, with a .bmp background of space.

However, when I actually "record" it, the whole screen is black. You can see the spaceship and the planet, the background IS there but it is just a tiny little square in the upper left of the screen.

What am I doing wrong? I really need to find this out and fix it as I am making 3d cutscenes for a game.

Just so you know, yes I did click the render background button.

Not sure what the problem is as I use Blitz for this sort of stuff...however..

Try this...
Instead of applying the starfield texture as a background, apply it to a single plane, scale it as required and position it behnd the planet.
Should work ok.

Bazza

Well, that does work...sorta. But it doesn't look quite as natural and also when the camera changes angles it becomes evident that it's just a plane.

Still don't know why I can't use a background. I've changed it to different formats like .jpg and also different quality levels and sizes, still get the problem where it's just a small square in the corner.

I'd like to hear from anyone who has sucessfully made an animated scene in Canvas with a fullscreen background. I have a feeling I'm forgetting something obvious. I guess I could try to import the scene into Blender or something, but that would mean having to learn how to use it and I'm not really up to it right now. Besides I'm familiar with canvas now..and I paid for it so yea..

The normal way to create starfields that can be viewed from any camera angle is to apply the textures to scaled up inverted spheres like this...

The cosmos is created using three low poly spheres each scaled larger than the last.
The outer sphere has the nebula gasses applied as an alpha texture.
The middle sphere has a distant starfield texture applied as an alpha texture.
The inner sphere has a starfield texture with larger stars applied as an alpha texture.
So you get quite a good appearence of depth for the cosmos



This is one of my in game shots but could easily be converted to a cut scene if required.
However, in the same way that, you wouldn't use 3D Canvas to create a game, only the models (animated or not) that are required by the game.
You also wouldn't normaly use Canvas to create cut scenes for the game, cut scenes are usually coded in just the same way as the game is created.

Sorry can't help with the backdrop problem, but I think you are on the wrong track trying to use Canvas to create the cut scenes.

Bazza

Hey thanks this is really working. I am on the right track now. Before I get into the extra details like nebula and stuff, I just want a convincing starfield. Since reading the last post I have experimented with it, but do I have to create the texture in a certain shape before I apply it to the insides of the inverted sphere? Because when I apply the texture to it, the texture is stretched out near the tops. I tried making the texture more of an ellipse but that didn't seem to work so well either.

But maybe with more experimenting I can figure things out.

There isn't really a way around the distortion problem within 3D Canavas, what you are trying to do is to fit a square texture onto a sphere and it won't fit without distortion, especially at the top and bottom of the sphere.

If you are just applying a basic starfield, ie...white dots on a black background this should work without to much visible distortion.The trick is to position the camera so it doesn't 'see' the top or bottom of the sphere.
If you are going to apply nebula textures this is more difficult to control, but this isn't a 3DC problem.
3DC doesn't have the features required to get around the distortion problem but it's not supposed to, it's a 3D modeler not a game/demo 3D engine.

By using a 3D engine such as Blitz, Dark BasicPro etc.you can use other features such as cube maps, which help to correct the problem.
Also you don't need to create animation frames for something like a cut scene, it's much easier to write some code for a cut scene than to create an animation sequence for it.

The next problem you have is that 3DC doesn't support any blend modes for either textures or models, which you need to create a realistic starfield.
Most important you can't set a model to be Full Bright in 3DC, so you can't get your starfield to glow or shine brightly as it should.

Bazza