3D Background?? Is it possible?
 

Ok; Silly questions. Is there a product you can buy, build or steal:biggrin:, that you can put on the back of your tank to give it a 3D look with ledges etc?
I have seen the similar ones for reptile tanks but I would like to know if anybody else has done it in a reef tank and to what degee of success.
I have seen the 3D stuff online and it looks nice but it is all for freshwater, I want to know is there a place where you can order sized or cut to fit sheets of saltwater reef looking background or what material could you use??I think if i is possible it would be a great way to disguise intakes and jets etc. Sort of like a false wall, so to speak. Also what would be the possible problems of a system like that?

You can consider a foam background and then cover it with a cement paste.

I've seen people use rock. The one guy (sphelps) attatched a bunch of rock to the back of his tank. Kinda a cave look. I think he attached all the rock to a piece of Acrylic first and ziptied the rocks or something but you get the idea.

http://i11.photobucket.com/albums/a1...7lowertank.jpg
http://i11.photobucket.com/albums/a1...s/DSC_0018.jpg

Mine looked great, I only took it out because it took up too much real estate in my tank (only a 90gal) I made an eggcrate scaffold for the pond foam to adhere to & gooped away. UV will degrade it with time so you need to seal it, you could then use a Marine paint(s) to prepp it anyway you'd like. With a little work these backgrounds look very nice. There is an old photo of mine here somewhere in the gallery.

On RC there's a bunch of builds using expanding foam or pond foam, links to some here.

I used eggcrate and covered it with aragacrete (DIY LR).

So what type of cement paste do you use? I thought about using a mold of some type with that pond foam you can buy and adding sand to it to get a nice texture. Once it hardens you could cut it for intakes etc and shape it for your tank using egg-crate. Does that sound feasable? If not, what about a D.I.Y. live rock mix in a mold??

This was an interesting thread on RC using rock, foam and eggcrate
http://reefcentral.com/forums/showth...oam+background

Pangea Rocks:

http://www.aquarium-background.com/catalogue.asp

They sell 2 models for reefs: Coral1 and Coral2

Site says for tanks up to 300cm...

I made my own by cutting live dry base rocks on my tile saw and then siliconing them to the back wall.