[piroshki]

Well, I'm dreaming of a ground plane...

Doing boats, I have the special challenge of having to render horizons, and endless seas. I am about to embark on the HDRI path to get some beautiful skies in my renders, however I'm stuck because rendering a proper ground plane (or water plane) means it has to stop at some point, and it doesn't reach the sky...

It seems to me that the only way of doing this would be a special behavior of the render engine that could take an MXM and create an endless ground plane . I would suggest that there would need to be an algorythm that reduces the influence of the ground plane on the lighting of the scene (so the solution doesn't take years) so after, say, 100 meters the engine does not need to calculate the influence on the scene, only the average properties of the texture. The drop-off would have to be progressive, obviously.

Thoughts? Possible? Workarounds?

Tom.

[Ernesto]

i agree
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[piem]

Thoughts :
A " GI/reflection Exclude Fall-off" (circular and/or linear and manipulable), based on a fake Target point to place anywhere on the scene.
Could be applied to any object too.

[John Cantu]

Yeah I really need a ground plane for doing boats too. Right now I use a rhino displaced wavy plane with bumpy water, and a circular flat plane connected to it to extend to the horizon with low poly counts. I also have a "seafloor" plane with a drak texture to make the water work below the water plane. 3 surfaces that are kinda a hassle to deal with. I wish there was a way to add ground planes (multiple), say what elevation they are at and what material they are.

[Aji Enrico]

The distance 5km is what you can see at max, discarding the refraction of light
that actually decreases the view distance.
Having a script creating a simple curved plane is a good solution =)

Then later on expanding the environment options and adding atmosphere
effects. That should do the refraction part accurate =)