Distant backdrops
A camera-centred environment sphere (mountains, a skyline, or a gradient sky) that sits at the horizon and sweeps as you look around.
Open in the interactive manual →The interactive version has full-text search, a table of contents, and light/dark themes.
A backdrop fills the far distance behind your scene: a mountain ridge, a city skyline, a hazy gradient sky. Add one with Create ▸ Backdrop (there's also a Backdrop geometry preset). It's an environment sphere centred on the camera at a fixed world heading: it sits at effective infinity, so turning the camera sweeps across it like a real horizon, while walking around never shifts it. The backdrop isn't clickable in the viewport. Select it in the Scene Tree and edit it in the Backdrop section of Properties.
Quick presets
Start from a one-click preset, then tweak: Sky and Distant ridge and Valley haze (gradient washes), or Mountains, City skyline, and Foothills (bundled silhouette cutouts).
Kind
| Kind | What it is |
|---|---|
| Gradient | A two-color wash: a Top and Bottom color fading into a sky dome. |
| Solid color | A single flat color band. |
| Image silhouette | A transparent-sky cutout (mountains, skyline, hills) wrapped seamlessly around the horizon. Pick a bundled one or paste a Custom URL, and Tint it (multiplies, so drop it dark for a night skyline). |
Placing it
- Heading: rotate the sphere around world-up (degrees) to aim a feature, like a mountain peak, in a particular direction.
- Distance: the sphere's radius, scaled to sit inside the camera's far plane.
- Height: offsets the sphere centre up or down; a negative value sits the horizon band lower in view, which sells the sense of far-off distance.
- Band size: the vertical thickness of the horizon band. Keep it small and the scenery reads as far away.
- Opacity: fade the whole backdrop.