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I have a large environment texture of space that I'm using as the background of my scene.

carina

However, when I try to use it in my render, I can only see a tiny part of it.

render

I want to scale down or "zoom out" on the texture, so I can see more of it in the rendered area. I tried to use a Mapping node and scale it that way, but it did nothing (I could rotate, but not scale).

This is my node setup:

enter image description here

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  • $\begingroup$ What is the size of the image? What is the render size? Are you rendering at 100%? Can you post your compositing node setup? $\endgroup$
    – user1853
    Commented Mar 18, 2016 at 0:19
  • $\begingroup$ The image is 4.66 MB, 4533x2618 pixels. Render resolution is 1920x1080 at 100%, if that's what you mean by "render size." I'm not using any compositing nodes, but I did add the nodes used for the world shader. $\endgroup$
    – Somatic
    Commented Mar 18, 2016 at 0:27

3 Answers 3

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Vector Mapping node is the correct way.

Make sure you are using an Environment Texture node connected to the Generated socket of a Texture Coordinate node. Then use the Vector Mapping X or Y scale to control it.

enter image description here

The trick is making sure you scale only in one of the three axis at a time, otherwise it will yield no visible effect.

Also have in mind that this will introduce some stretching distortion that may be more visible in certain directions, as spherical environment textures can't really be "zoomed out" in the traditional 2D image sense.

Correctly zooming out would require actually moving the physical camera in relation to the background subject and the image would need to be captured again from a different point in space, yielding a slightly different perspective. This cannon be correctly simulated with bare image transforms or manipulation, and is thus an approximation.

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    $\begingroup$ Okay, so the trick is to only scale it on one axis (just the Y, in your example). When I scaled it on all the axes simultaneously, it did nothing. Thanks! $\endgroup$
    – Somatic
    Commented Mar 18, 2016 at 0:43
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The scale mapping solution only works if you don't have to look around with your camera, otherwise you will notice the sphere-like background image has been stretched.

A correct way to do this scale is actually changing the Field Of View (or Focal Length in blender) of your camera, for this:

  1. Select your camera
  2. In the 3D Viewport: Right Mouse Click > Camera Lens Angle and drag

or

  • In the Properties panel click the green camera tab, in Lens section change the Focal Length field
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    $\begingroup$ This definitely produces superior results. No odd distortion and 3D objects in the scene will be affected appropriately. $\endgroup$
    – Atorian
    Commented Sep 4, 2021 at 11:30
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Another way I would try is to tile the texture, make the texture tilable in photoshop, then set it to half scale, so the image repeats, this works best with backgrounds that you don't have a ton of unique details or don't move the camera around to see the repeating image. The way I would do it is to add a wider additional part to the image, of say just stars, which will then compress the part you want to see into your field of view.

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