Integrating Cg into Video - What looks fake?

Hi! I’m trying to integrate a building into a video and would like to ask for your help! Can you see in the picture what wakes it look fake? And perhaps what’s good already? I feel a little bit stumped but I figure that configuring the materials might be what would really make a difference… Happy to hear your thoughts! :slight_smile:


The CG is too crisp and clean, and the colours a little too saturated. It also doesn’t look grounded to me. By that I mean, despite it being an overcast day, there should still be that shadow right where the building meets the ground.

Having said that, not a bad job. I did one years ago (using different software) and challenged artists to figure out what was fake (it was a desktop scene, with four CG elements). It took them three days, so I was quite pleased with it.

Do you think blurring the cg would help the integration? Thanks for your fast answer!

Most CG needs to be blurred a pixel or two to really look right. You could probably blur it more, then add some sharpening to help create some of the artifacting of the image. And a contact shadow would be good too like Roken said.

A little bit of blue due to air “interference”

Happy to hear so many ideas! :smiley: Thanks! I’ve been working on the UVs of the building to be able of texturing it more easily! I want to keep the walls pretty clean, but they seem to be perhaps a tad to clean right now… Any ideas? A little bit of dirt or something? It’s supposed to be a newly built house so it shouldn’t be to dirty though.


WIP Please share your Thoughts! :slight_smile: Nicer Textures for the walls, something weird has happened to the glass balconys, gotta fix that. I will also try to strengthen the shadow layer…

Aside from the balconies and the trees being blocked, looks nice. Passes the squint test

It’s much better, BUT, the whites are still too white. Look at the surrounding buildings in the background. Nothing is white. They are all very light shades of grey. The whiteness punches it out.

EDIT: It’s weird to describe it. The white is not so much too white, as it is milky white. It needs something to remove the flatness.

Turning into a nice composite, though.

EDIT2. Is the building actually sitting on your shadow plane? It looks as though it’s floating.

EDit 3: You need to mask foreground parts of the image. You have a truncated tree lol. In fact, fixing that would help massively.

somehow the perspective seems wrong. maybe you shall tryto change the focal length on the camera a little to let the right edge of the building turn outhwards a little.

to check if your colors are ok you can try to see how the image is reacting under strong contrast


You can work a bit more the texturing and colors and after that I think you can finish the integration in compositing.
It will be easier to adjust saturation and values , but your materials need to be consistent :
all the colors can be too dark, but they need to be as correct as possible between each other, so when you’ll push the luminance all the color get better and no colors is going to pop.

One last thing that you can do is to add a little grain to the image , than can help unifying the cg and the image. With a very grainy image the best is to first degrain the footage and then apply the same grain in the CG and the image, but as your image isn’t that much grainy…

Wow guys! :smiley: I just went to bed and then I came back seeing lots of new ideas! Really cool! Thanks! I haven’t implemented anything after waking up but this is what I ended with last night!


I removed the color grade at the end, I didn’t really like the effect.

Current Version


Tried to add grain(perhaps the texture I’m using is a little low res) and to sharpen the image after combining them. I also added color correction according to thismethod to both the building and the video before adding them together.

@sozap Could you specify what you meant by “working on texturing and coloring”? I’m not really sure in what direction I in that case would go… Any concrete ideas? :slight_smile:

At that time , the colors (saturation and value) was a bit off, now it’s looking way better.
Maybe you can add a very subtle yellow tint in compositing to have the white match the other building under construction,
you can also replace the orange color with something that’s in the picture ( brick, or yellow like the little house behind).

These are little cheats , even if it’s not that logical it’s worth to try and that can help sell the idea that the building you’re integrating belongs to the same place of the ones in the photography.

Even if you can push it further I think it’s working really well now. Did you show it to someone to see if he spots something wrong in the image ?

Thanks Sozap!
Here is a testrenderI made to get like a pointer of where to head next! I’m going to create some kind of ground but otherwise I’m rather happy with it! It’s supposed to be an animation of the building getting constructed! Please say what you think!

There are also some bugs going on with the Boolean operator that I use for the animation causing those weird frames sometimes. Not figured out how to fix that yet!

You might want to experiment with “Build” modifier

Thanks for the suggestion, seems like it may do a better job than BoolTools that I’m using now!

You might still try to use the boolean approach, but i’d suggest to rotate just a little your “BigCube”, in order to give the impression that the building process has a “direction” (especially usefull for the floors).

Hey great !

The lighting / compositing works quite well !
About the animation , I think there are two direction here :

1/ sell the idea that this is somewhat real : maybe then you should look more into timelapses of actual constructing buildings. It’s not that linear.
Maybe having some trucks and people moving around in the same timelapse fashion, adding objects that appear/disappear, change places would help also.

2/ make something less believable but more impressive : like having some parts falling from the sky, something more in a “motion design” fashion.
cars and static lighting already tells us that this isn’t a timelapse, so maybe it’s not worth sticking to something logical.

But all that is really depending on what time you allow for animation, in fact it’s already nice as it is without bugs.