I did some experimenting. And turned a photo I took with my phone a few days ago into this:
It’s still rough. It was just starting as a sort of tech demo, so nothing too fancy. But the concept works and I can do some more complex modelling now!
Does the lighting on the sphere match the lighting of the picture? The sphere looks like there’s a bright light source up and to the left, but the silhouettes in the foreground suggest otherwise. Light-matching is really important to successfully merging CGI into real photos, so pay really close attention to it.
In fact, don’t hesitate to make parts of your spaceship entirely self-illuminated!
I like it! But you should add the reflection of the sphere to the windows of the building on the right.
I don’t know actually. It was much harder to do right than I expected and I’m really not completely happy with the pic at all :'D
Basically, I don’t even know where the sun is. I haven’t taken that photo with the intent to do anything with it so I paid no attention to where the sun actually was so I kind of had to guess it and do some trial and error on what’s looking okay.
Also it’s really tricky to get the sense of scale right in such works. I don’t want it to be a death star so I only put up some Mist with a Mix node in post instead of actually mixing in the sky which would make it look like it’s seen from outside the atmosphere (Something like this: http://i.imgur.com/Z8Ex8B7.jpg )
I’ll definitely do some more detailed work on my next works.
