Every now and then, I stumble across a feature in 3ds max that I’ve never seen before, or known how to use. Today, I found one of them and I can’t wait to share it!

I have been using Corona for a while now, and one of the features I wished it had was an ‘infinite’ ground plane, like Vray does so that I can have endless terrain that meets the horizon, such as you would need in a desert scene, or a view looking out to sea. Up until now! I have discovered a cool feature hidden away in 3dmax basic primitive plane settings – which means that this will work with any renderer. There is a magic setting that allows you to multiply the scale at render time – see below for examples.

Here is just a basic plane with no special settings. The mapping is set to real world scale. But what if I want the plane to reach the horizon? How big do I have to make it – and then I would have a massive piece of geometry in my scene that I don’t want.

Here, I have set the render multiplier to 1000, and it has effectively created an infinite plane! Happy days! And the mapping is still correct since is uses real world scale. There was a slight shift in the mapping origin between this and the original, but the scale is correct.

Yay!