Billboard scenery elements

Virtually, any photo you take or find on the Internet can be turned into a scenery element. Take this one of wild horses, for example. Would you have ever thought of using an image like this in an arch-viz scene?

However, horse lovers need a home too! The rendered-up version made it to the finals of a rendering competition, which was designed to show off the capabilities of IRender without doing any postprocessing in Photoshop. All I did was to cut out the foreground, mid-ground, and background from the same image and set them up, as you can see in the following screenshot:

All you need to remember when doing this is that the further away from the camera the billboard image is, the larger it will have to be, so the individual cutouts will need to be resized by eye. Here's how it came together. This is purely a SketchUp output without any rendering. You can see the cutout edges in black, in the following screenshot:

Creating billboard elements

We create billboard elements as follows:

When you import and explode images in SketchUp, they behave in just the same way as any rectangle surface with a texture applied to it. So, you can draw on it and erase sections. This can however be difficult when your image is in position, because it might be at a weird angle or obstructed by other items. Using this technique, you have the image lying horizontally in the plan view, so you can draw over it in a flat 2D view.

The following image is what the horses looked like when they were clipped. As you can see, you could create whole scenes just with photos and no other modeling at all!

However, usually, you would use this technique to insert a foreground image of foliage or people and a background image of, say, a city or country scene: