Background Color while in Sun & Sky

Hey guys-

I am having trouble making a white backgound while being in Sun & Sky mode. I tried placing a large object behind my current object and placing a white material on that but it comes out grey. Any tips?

Thank You in advance!

By the way I am using Autocad Mechanical 2012

Read this:

http://www.cadtutor.net/forum/showthread.php?11722-Contribute-a-tip-become-famous/page31

I did that and the background is still coming out grey....

Okay, now i did what you mentioned in your post but that is just the same as typing 'BACKGROUND' and changing the background to white. It now washes out the whole rendering and does not hold the sun & sky quality of the rendering. I basically what to have my sun & sky render but with a white background instead of the defaulted grey.

Here are the examples, first with sun & sky, second with white background

any idea on how to fix?

It works for me.

Here's a screenshot of my sun properties along with a quick render of a box on a white background.

Nick: Did you notice the screenshot above? The status of sky properties is set to OFF.

Try this. In the Background dialog box click the True Color tab. Now drag the Luminance slider all the way to the top so it reads 100. This should turn the sample color swatch to white and the Color Number should change to 255,255,255 which is the RGB code for white. This tip comes courtesy of Ralph Grabowski's ebook Rendering with AutoCAD 2012.

I will try the true color but as for turning off the sky background, it keeps changing back to sky background

what could be the problem that I can not turn the sky off?

Okay, I opened up a new document and I can have the sky off but the background is black not white.

could the washed out look deal with the materials I am using?

Did you set your background to solid and white?

Yes, I set my background to solid and white. The washed out look might have something to do with your materials, if they are highly reflective they will reflect the white background.

Another way would be to render with the regular grey background, save as Tif 32 bits with alpha, open in Photoshop and then adjust the background color to anything you want. If you don't have Photoshop, you can download and use Gimp, it's free.

Thanks Cad64 that is how I was doing it before. Would you use the majic wand to change the background in photshop?

Autocad is such crap when it comes to rendering. I've tried saving out a render as tif with alpha and also as png with alpha, but neither one will give me a proper alpha channel. Normally, from Studio Max, I would save out a tif with alpha, open in Photoshop and easily separate the 3D objects from the background with a simple alpha channel selection. I cannot do that with the tif generated from Autocad. The alpha channel is just pure white. There is no way to separate the solid objects from the background, so the channel is basically useless.

And the magic wand isn't going to work very well for you because the gray background is going to be reflected in your material, so you won't get a clean selection.

Sorry man, I don't know what else to tell you. I'm leaving in a few hours and won't be back until Monday, so hopefully someone else will come along to help you out.

Good luck.