> Visit the Phantom Photo Match website!
Initial post:
Phantom Photo Match is an upcoming standalone program for usage alongside Octane Render. It allows you to create augmented reality in Octane, inside real life photographs of an (architecture) project you might be doing.
The interface is extremely easy to use. Phantom Photo Match is designed to do all of the annoying stuff for you. NO MORE CLUELESS CAMERA GUESSING! Now you will be able to do it super accurately. And most of all: FAST. If you need to do this often, this tool will save you many hours of work and annoyance.
It works as follows:
1. Import a photo
2. Align 4 axis lines along the perspective lines of your photo.
3. Optional: import your OBJ mesh
4. Drag the origin marker around the photo to determine the origin point of your OBJ mesh. Then use the scale setting to make sure your scene is correctly scaled against the photograph.
5. During the edits, Phantom Photo Match will use it's powerful algorithm to mathematically reverse engineer the correct perspective data. This happens in realtime, so whenever you made an edit, the correct new camera is automatically calculated for you. When you are happy, simply click one of the variables in the top-right corner of the screen. That variable is then copied to your clipboard (with a much higher decimal precision than shown in the GUI for super accuracy), then you can just use CTRL+V to copy paste it in the camera settings inside Octane. Octane Render has no support to load the camera settings from a file, so I came up with this method instead, and it works very fast. You simply put the programs alongside each other, click in PPM, paste in Octane, repeat until you have entered all 10 properties. (Position, Target, Up-vector and Horizontal FOV)
By using a 'shadow catcher' material inside Octane, you can cast shadows 'into your photograph'. Basically Octane will do shadow casting on an invisible material. When you overlay your render with the photograph, it will appear as if your 3D is casting shadows inside the photo. If you compare my 2 screenshots below, you will notice how my Bulborb (copyright Nintendo) casts shadows onto the grass. I will explain this all in more detail in the manual (+ tutorial files).
