Blender - Avoiding Unwanted Walls or "Infinite" Ground Planes

[ODdOnLifeItself]

Hello

Often, we are modeling objects which we want to place in a scene, but it's not a full-blown environment that the objects "live" in.

If we set our objects on a simple plane, then 1) the edges of the plane are visible in the render, looking amateurish and 2) we often have an abrupt "intrusion" of the sky around this plane.

One way around this, of course, is to just make the ground plane infinite and to look down upon our objects. This works, but if we change viewpoints, closer to the surface, suddenly we are back with the condition mentioned above. If we are looking relatively straight on to the objects, then the plane really must extend pretty far in order to avoid a visible horizon.

A clever way around this is to create the ground plane a bit larger than the objects and then to take that plane and add some edge loops behind the objects and make them slightly curve upward. (We want SubSurf Modifier on level 2 or so and we need Smoothing turned ON) By doing this, no sky is visible and no hard divisions where we suddenly meet an unneeded wall behind our objects.

Doing it this way, we still can have our ground plane and can have nice soft shadows; and the scene behind the objects doesn't distract our attention from the main elements in the scene.

In the image below, I placed a couple of objects and one not-so-large ground plane. By doing as mentioned above, we have our shadows, there is no sky (showing) and there is no unnecessary wall-floor intersection line to steal our attention from the "real scene." Additionally, we can get very, very close to the surface and it still works. (If the top edge of the ground plane starts to show when you do this, then you only have to go to Edit mode and select the top edges and raise them up a bit. If your lights are low and are casting shadows onto the curved part of the plane, creating an unnatural look, merely make the upward curve start further behind the objects...problem solved.)



Here is the wireframe of the scene for better illustration...



I am including the (packed) Blendfile so that, in Blender, you can see exactly what I have done to set this up.

Hope this helps!

Take care

James

P.S. Bonus: Unless specifically noted... all objects and images (in any of my Blender example postings) are free to be used in your scenes (with or without modifications) with no restrictions whatsoever. Have fun!