Within Solarworks Visualize, you have very easy control of the ground shadow intensity, reflection amount and roughness in the Scene Advanced tab. There are times, however, that you need a ground plane which gives you more control due to the fact you can add an appearance. A ground plane is, as the name suggests, a simple piece of geometry that acts as the ground. We can add these in using the primitives that come within Visualize in the Model tab and then just add an appearance to them to control what they look like. For some models, you can move the camera to avoid seeing the horizon line, especially if it is a smaller model. However, with this chair, I want my camera from a lower angle so we see the horizon line. This might be okay, but if you don't want to see this line, you can add a circular alpha channel on the appearance to essentially blur it out. A white circle, gradiating out to black, means that only the centre of the geometry is seen as the black parts of the geometry get hidden. Another reason that you might want a ground plane is if you were taking your model into another program to put it next to other images, or maybe the images will be on your website. We may not want the ground shadow to spill out of the frame and create visible image borders. Rather than having to try and change the lighting or zooming the camera out, meaning more post-processing, we can turn off the ground shadow from the scene tab and then use another primitive shape to add certain area that the shadow is allowed to be. As I don't want reflections, I will add a matte white appearance and then rather than having a sudden stop for the shadow, we can add another alpha channel to gradiate the shadow into nothing before the edge of the frame. You can see this looks a lot cleaner when the images are in the grid. The final reason you may want a ground plane is to add texture and bump maps to the ground reflection when putting your models on a backplate. In this van model, the backplate of a wet road needs a little reflection. However the reflection is too clean. Even with some roughness, there is too much white hue and the reflection just doesn't white fit the road texture. To fix this, we can use a shadow capture ground plane. If we used for backplate where the shadow needs to go up an obstacle such as a wall, the shadow capture is hidden from view but is an object that the shadow falls upon. We can hack it though if we leave the reflection and roughness of the shadow capture options to zero and instead use an appearance to get some reflections. We can then use the texture of the appearance to put a bump map down which will change how the light interacts with the ground plane. We can either just use this to create some more interesting reflections or back in our van model adding an asphalt texture onto the ground plane really makes the reflections a lot more realistic.