Blender add-on: create a camera view filling backdrop

whether for product presentations or outdoor scenes, often you need a backdrop that nicely fills the camera view, preferably with a nice curve upwards to hide the horizon and also not larger than necessary to reduce the number of vertices and particles.

Creating this by hand is not massively time consuming but tedious enough to benefit from a small add-on: BackDrop.

Features

By default it creates a flat horizontal mesh at z=0 that fills the camera view exactly. By working with the margin option you can create a backdrop that is slightly bigger than the exact view and unchecking the Zero level option will allow you to position the backdrop on another z-coordinate.

The Lift option will elevate the far end of the backdrop resulting in a curved mesh. The curvature can be adjusted but that doesn't work well yet.

The backdrop mesh is parented to the camera so it will move with it if you rotate or translate the camera.

Availability

The plugin is available on my blenderaddons project on GitHub. Just download backdrop.py and install it from File -> user preferences -> Add-ons -> install from file

Bugs and limitations

The plugin cannot in all circumstances create a suitable backdrop, for example if the camera is pointing upward. If this is the case, a suitable error is displayed in the properties in the toolbar.

Also, the curvature control sucks, and in fact create a curves surface using bezier interpolation is not optiomal since the points are not evenly spaced. For this we need to convert it to an arc length parameterization but I don't have time to do that now.