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During Easter week end, the parking area facing my house was desert. It was the moment to take some photos to allow compositing.

A good place to put my CG vehicles. I created for my favourite character Elisabeth Warfield an helicopter Hughes 500D. The inside still lacks some details, like flight instruments, but the model is enough ready for some renders from outside.

The current image is a blend of two Pathtracing renders, one with Daylight system for shadows and a render made with an unwrapped LDR mirror ball shot on location by myself as environment lighting.

very nice!

try to add some dirt

do not use aperture

nice job

i agree with gabriel, some dirt, and a second thin shadow contact layer under the first heli.
The range rover should be desatureted a bit to give some atmosphere and depth in your image.

Hi, thanks for your comments.

@gabrielefx : In fact I used procedural dirt on the hull of the helicopters and on the character clothes. If I increase it, I get unnatural results. Also, Aircrafts are always kept clean. It is a matter of aerodynamic (limit layer).

I will add scratches on the skis and legs later (need to create drawed textures).

do not use aperture

@Vanya : I will check if I moved the cursor by accident. The aperture is supposed to be set to zero, because the background reference image is neat at all distance.
EDIT : Checked : You were right, I had not saved with the cursor at zero, and it returned to default value 1.0 ! Thanks for having pointed that out !

a second thin shadow contact layer under the first heli

@osmose : What do you mean by second contact shadow ? There are already two kinds of shadows : a very diffuse one due to LDR lighting and a sharper one due to the daylight system. The sun is supposed to be the only source in this scene, and was rather weak this day when I took the photo. I had to decrease the alpha value of the ground/Matte material to 0.7 to reduce the strength of the shadow.

Do you mean just increase the shadow under the skis in areas close to the ground to simulate AO ?

Maybe I should try to blend with a Directlighting layer/pass with AO mode 3.

About the Land Rover, I added it at last moment and chaged the color to match the helicopter colors. I agree that it is too clean and saturated. It had the dirt from my show scene, but the UV dirt texture couldn't match the new colors. I will create a new drawed texture when I will have time.

On the following image, I have done some post production, and using the Material ID mask, I have added fake reflections on some materials using a photo taken on location. Obviously, it is not accurate as the helicopters were not in the scene. I could do it better if I had a render from an other angle.

Other image and higher resolution here :

http://3d-synthesis.com/57-Hughes500D.html

how you did that with the image ? i can do that in octanerender, the floor and the background integrated, can you explain ? please ? thank you roubal

@merid888 :

If you want to add vehicles or props, like a phone booth, directly on the ground, you just have to add to your scene a plane on which objects (like cars)will be placed. Place it at altitude Zero if it is the ground plane.

You can also put objects on objects seen on a photo.In this case you have to model also the surface of the object.

In any case, this ground plane or object surface will have a diffuse material with "Matte" enabled. this makes the material to be a shadow catcher only. This means that your material will be transparent, except in areas where there is a shadow. And only the shadow will be visible.

You render with a template image in background. The background image is not rendered. You have to use the exact same image (same pixel ratio, at least) in your favorite image editing software, and composite it with the png image rendered in Octane.

The best way for easily finding the good angle, distance and focus length of the camera to match perfectly the background view, is to use photos that you have taken yourself, and having taken precise measures on location.

For my own, I would advice to create a template mesh that you delete or make unvisible once you have adjusted your image view properly.

Just like the red template that I created for my image with helicopters. Some views and explanations in this topic :

http://render.otoy.com/forum/viewtopic. ... 6&start=40

And also, do not forget to enable Alphachannel in the Kernel parameters !

I hope that this is clear enough...

EDIT... sorry, needless post and solution was right in front of me!

Amazing pic btw ROUBAL

looks good

maybe knock the saturation back a bit?

easiest way to do this is to add a layer filled entirely with black, group it with the render layer in photoshop, change its transfer mode to 'hue' and make it 10%?

maybe knock the saturation back a bit?

I already reduced saturation of 15% on the cars in background and then reduced saturation of all CG parts of 15% again ! I tried a bit more, but the helicopter and Land Rover became to look grey... so I kept them like that.

easiest way to do this is to add a layer filled entirely with black, group it with the render layer in photoshop, change its transfer mode to 'hue' and make it 10%?

Thanks, I will try that. Usually I use this method to darken a layer, using multiply mode.