Composistion

Hey i was wondering how exactly do you add a 3d model to a scene already filmed. I watched Colin Levy’s tutorial on Breakdown/Overview of a VFX shot and i don’t think i need camera tracking as the camera doesn’t move at all during the scene. Basically i have a robot of some sort and i want it to appear like it is on the street but it doesn’t look real. e.g lack of shadows etc.

http://img339.imageshack.us/img339/1700/problem2cl4.jpg

So how can i make it look more realistic

Thanks in advance

Also i just thought i would add, i am aware it needs to be textured but i am just getting information about how to make it more realistic when it is textured and rigged so i am not wasting time later on. Also does anyone have any information about texture painting?

to get the robot’s shadow, put the robot on a green plane. Match the lighting. mix with video after using the matte nodes to make the green transparent.

PapaSmurf: Wouldn’t it be better/easier to just have a plane set to ShadowOnly, then you wouldn’t need to use the matte nodes.

Probably the best two “tricks” I have used for realism … and I do this in a conventional studio-photography situation too … are these: - In the real world, the lights are never “pure white.” And they are almost never of the same color. On a summer day, the warm yellow sun is providing incident-light on the highlights, and… that cool blue sky is also providing incident light into those “shadows!” Furthermore, the incident-light that then reflects off of something (the street, for instance) changes color (as well as temperature) to some degree before it bounces onto another object. - In the real world, light has texture and often motion. Trees, clouds, passers-by, automobiles … all of these factors conspire in subtle ways to add complexity to real-world illumination.
Now, when you are setting up a CG shot, or you are setting up a still-life photograph in a darkroom, or you are setting up a movie-shot outdoors, you don’t need to faithfully model reality. All that you need to do is to make it look “realistic,” which you do by suggesting reality … and doing so within the constraints of your medium (film or video). The actual techniques that you employ need not have anything at all to do with “reality.” That’s why the galloping hoofbeats of an approaching posse, in all of those radio spaghetti-westerns, were done with … coconuts.

(The best example of this was a photo-shoot I witnessed where a “glorious daytime scene” in the main lobby of a historic hotel … was shot at three o’clock in the morning on a new-moon night. Every bit of lighting in that shot was artificial.)