I’m not willing to put more effort into the tracking. its still a bit off but that’s fine. thought i’d make it into a floating crystal alien invasion situation with an f22 flyby.
I have to admit this was a lot of fun and answered a lot of questions i had. Blender keeps impressing me with just how powerful it is.
Although the masking process in the compositor is good to know. i find the inclusion of the shadow catcher option much easier to work with, i just select my ground plane, in the object data panel under cycles settings is a check box for shadow catcher.
cycles then ignores the material of the plane and only renders the shadows cast upon it.
as a test i made my ground plane blue and it gave the crystals (glass material) a blue hue so it still can affect the scene’s light bounces.
really cool. 
