The Ground Plane is an automatic display of plane where the ground would be.

SketchUp Settings

IRender nXt uses the color and transparency of the SketchUp ground plane to create a ground plane in your rendering.

IRender nXt uses the color and transparency of the SketchUp ground plane to create a ground plane in your rendering.

Ground Plane Materials

From the Background Tab you can define and edit materials for the Ground Plane.

You can apply any material you want and then enhance these materials with reflection, textures, etc. This makes it easy to add grass or water to the ground plane of your model and you can even apply a grass texture for land, or a Procedural Bump Map and reflection to emulate water.

Watch this Video to see how to do it:

Opaque Ground Plane

Checking Opaque will ignore the transparency setting of the SketchUp ground plane and create a solid ground plane material.

Alpha Transparent Ground Plane

There is a setting on the Sun/Sky setup tab which lets you define an Alpha Transparent Ground Plane. With an Alpha Transparent Ground Plane, you can save the rendering as an Alpha Transparent image, and the ground plane will be transparent. However, shadows on the ground will be visible. This can be used to place the ground plane image on top of a background image and still see where the shadows would appear. (Of course this works best if you are placing he image on a flat surface.)

Note:If you don't have a paint program which supports transparent images, you can load images into SketchUp and the transparent alpha channel will be recognized.

Simple model with shadow cast on Ground Plane

Transparent image placed in front of a background image in SketchUp. It is easy in SketchUp to size and move the alpha-transparent image.

See also

• IRender Alpha Images - Saving an image in transparent mode.
• SketchUp Styles - Setting ground plane color and transparency
• Grass / Carpet Maker Wizard - A simple way to assign grass or carpet to any surface