Rendering and Compositing - Blender Master Class: A Hands-on Guide to Modeling, Sculpting, Materials, and Rendering - page 244

and yellows toward the corner. Throughout, my goal
was to end up with a background that had a color
palette similar to that of my rendered image.
Finally, I hid the render layer, saved the back-
ground on its own as an .xcf file ( ctrl -S) so that I
could edit it later, and exported it as a .tga image
( ctrl -E). The background image and its various
stages are shown in Figure 14-17.

Compositing the Temple

With my background created, I returned to Blender's
compositor. First, I had to add my background
behind my render. To do so, I used the Alpha Over
node with the background as the first input and my
render as the second (see Figure 14-18).

Figure 14-17: Creating a background for the Jungle Temple in GIMP, using
an early, noisy render as a guide. The background was made with the same
dimensions as the final image, but only the corner showing the sky is shown
here. (The rest of the background image was black.) The render (on a sepa-
rate layer) was hidden before saving the background.

Figure 14-18: Compositing the background
in GIMP with an Alpha Over node. I also
added a Curves node to darken it slightly.