Updated for Blender Version: 3.1
To the Point
- Navigate to the World tab in the Properties Panel
- Find the Surface dropdown
- Click the Color block to pull up the color picker to change the color.
- To add a background image, press the white circle button next to the color swatch
- Select “Environment Texture”
- Click the “Open” button and navigate to the image you wish to use as an environment background image
- Click “Open Image” to apply image
- Adjust strength as needed
The Details
There are a variety of ways to add backgrounds to your scene, like using reference images and image planes. Unlike those background images, changing the Background Environment is an effective way of adding ambient light to a scene as well. This is typically a solid color, gradient or image that encompasses the full 360-degree space surrounding your entire scene and is renderable. The Background Environment not only adds a backdrop to the scene render, but it also adds light to your scene.
Navigate to the World tab in the Properties Panel . Find the Surface tab. By default, the environment background will be set to Color mode. For a single color, click the dark grey tab to pull up a color picker and adjust it to the desired color.
More often than not, you’ll want to add an image to the Background Environment. An image (especially a high-quality 360-degree HDRI image) will add a dynamic, natural form of lighting to your scene with very little work. In the World tab, in the Surface section, click on the yellow button next to “Color:”
From the menu, click “Environment Texture.” Now if you look at your scene in Rendered mode (Shift+Z) with the Cycles renderer, you will see the entire scene has turned Pink. Not to fear – this just means there is no image selected yet. In the World tab under Surface, click the Open button to select a background image. Navigate to the image you want to use as a background, select it and click Open Image in the top right. Your scene should now be using that image as the Environment Background. Use the strength slider to increase or decrease the amount of brightness that the image gives off.
You can further edit the world environment with shader nodes in the shader editor by selecting World from the dropdown in the top left. From there, you can use nodes like the Texture Coordinate and Mapping nodes to scale and rotate your environment texture.