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 — 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.