I’m a real estate photographer who is pretty new to blender. I’m looking for help and advice on how to realize a photo realistic virtual staging, the idea of placing 3D furniture in a 2D photograph, creating a believable and realistic result
I’ve done some testing googling etc. I’m using the blam Add on for the photo matching, which works quite well. I’ve also followed Blender Guru tutorial on Photo Background
My problem / challenge is the whole concept of realistic lighting and shadows (floor is ok, but the walls etc.) interacting with the photograph’s environment and lighting.
Something you might like to try (which I unfortunately don’t have experience in yet) is photographing a silver-ball HDRI in your locations to use later as image-based lighting. I really want to give this a go soon for my VFX composite experiments!
This technique has been used in movies for (at least helping) matching CGI lighting to onset/location lights, and might work well for your application, albeit with some fiddling around.
My understanding is that you would need a chrome ball on a stand, like a mic or light stand, which you place in your scene at the time of your regular shoot. You photograph it from the regular camera perspective, with bracketed exposures, and use these images to create the HDRI. You can then light your furniture and props using that image in Blender, and you’re essentially lighting them with the ‘real’ light from the shoot.
I’m sure this is only the tip of an iceberg, and only one approach, but worth a look I reckon.
You can use a silver Christmas ornament for the chrome ball. This is the right time of year to find them. If you wait till just after Christmas, you can probably get them even cheaper in the clearance section.
As Hammers mentioned, you shoot a bunch of images at different exposures. You’ll need a tripod for this. You also need to stack all those images into a HDRI image using Photoshop or something else.
Thanks Steve for chiming in, I’m glad to see someone has tried this! And a great idea to use a Christmas bauble. I’ll be doing that for sure…[goes off to peruse Christmas tree…]
