A detour here on compositing

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#1

I had an idea, to reuse my previous chess project. And use one frame as source picture for the composition.
With this I have al the info about light sources, camera position and other details. Because they are in the blend file.

So I copied a render end-frame as source and the accompanier blend file. In this blend file I removed everything, except camera and lights. The I added an old friend, the rabbit into the scene. I also changed the rabbit film output to transparent. So lights and camera setup are identical to the composite picture. yeah, yeah cheating …
Transparent film output - can also be done, masking the 3D object (never done that).

I set up the compositing and did the render. You can see a shadow is missing, but got the feeling it’s simple to fix. casting a shadow on the floor, without rendering the floor.

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#2

Cheating doesn’t work

I thought that by re-using the camera and lights information, composition merge would be easy. Nope, it isn’t :frowning:

The only thing what the rabbit needed to do was, diffuse and cast a shadow. But the underground (table cloth) has his own texture. unknown to me. And here starts the problem, the lighting behavior of the environment. The cloth is very shiny and the shadows are soft at least.
So, I admit, I cheated again and applied the same table cloth texture as in the chess scene.

if I render the rabbit influence on the table cloth, you see the reflecting as you would expect (looks like an under water scene). But if I use the shadow channel to merge the composition, It’s completely different. Shadow is completely different. Not sure what’s happening. But not what I expected. Lessons learned …

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Merging the composition, shows a strange rabbit shadow, reflection combination. I probably need something like an glossy channel … not sure it exists.

Cudo’s for the professionals who are making films like big transformer machines, devastating our cities … I’m not there yet!

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#3

Just starting this section, I know it’s already a few months and you more than likely figured it out by now, but I’m thinking with the shadow layer, it could just be an issue of changing the mix node to something like multiply or burn. try experimenting with the layer styles.

#4

Hi, thank you for your response. I find merging shadows difficult to master. After this lesson and project, I’ve use different approaches on mix nodes etc. But still it acquire a lot of practice.
I can imagine that it’s easier to build and render the complete environment, that merge real live footage.
Again thanks, for your response and happy holidays.

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