Hello all, I did a small animation/compositing test when I found this “Env” button, before I though that you had to place a plane with the same texture as the bg and render it shadeless:o
The movement could have been better, I know, but it was just a test.
Hey, that’s pretty good! The lighting matches very well! Could you give a little mini tutorial, I don’t know too much about compositing yet.
[Edit] Also, the ball seems to hover ever so slightly off the ground, move it down just a hair.
Thanks LOTRJ, this is how I did it:
I set up this scene (they’re dominoes) close to a wall. I set up a lamp coming from the right, and the blue light came from a nearby window.
Then, I took a picture of it (the one you see rendered), and another picture from up top for reference (so I knew where to place the planes)
In Blender (
) , I used the pic I took from the top as a background in one window, and the other one in another window. I set up the camera so that it was facing forward, and in top view added the planes. Back in the camera view I aligned them with the edges of the dominoes, and set their material as “Env”, which covers up any cg and shows the sky/world. Next, I added the plane underneath, and gave it an “Only Shadow” material, which would make only the shadows casted on the plane render. Then, knowing where my lights came from, I placed a slightly yellow spotlight off to the top right. Next, I added the sphere, scaled it, moved it, etc. I placed another lamp, a hemi this time, off to the left, behind the camera. I made this one a smidge blue. The animation was just simple IPO’s.
The sphere only appears to float because the shadow from the spotlight wasn’t casting it properly.
Here’s the .blend >> http://uploader.polorix.net//files/392/cgandrealife.blend <<
Almost convincing were it not that every object except the ball has a glossy reflection on the floor.
Pretty nifty, I never knew what that ‘env’ button did! No compositing nodes even. Definitely a handy piece of knowledge.
I can’t believe I missed what toontje said about the reflections, but he’s right. I thought something was a bit off, I just couldn’t put my finger on it. I thought it was the floating ball.
It could be a vampire ball 
I did a similar test, except it had a car, that was fully animated, so it was like 2 tests in one for me.
you can look at the picture and get the movie here:
Thanks people, I just noticed the reflection thing too, can anybody explain how this is done, because I’m kinda stumped.
BTW, I’m making a mechanical hand stick out of the wall 
Very nice! You can’t actually get glossy reflections in Blender 2.44 yet (although ‘broken’ has coded a patch). You could just get a ‘normal’ reflection by using the Ray Mirror option in the materials panel. You’d then need to render out the reflection as a seperate layer and composite it back into the original image using the composite nodes.
Edit: I managed to get quite a nice reflection in this composite:
Awesome!!!
I will try this, not sure if my knowledge of nodes will be enough, but i’ll try. Thanks a ton.
:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D
Well done! I like the ball floating, actually:yes:
just wanted to point out that the ball isn’t creating any shadows on the dominoes
Pash, you could set up some boxes to simulate the dominoes. Then make them receive shadows from the ball.
