Hi guys,
I’ve recently been trying to composite a 3D model into a Photo background (Backplate) using Cycles (2.66a) - I’ve done it in the past to some degree, but I seem to have lost the .blend and my instructions, all I have left is some crude screen-grabs which make no sense - it’s never been that straight forward, so I won’t beat myself up for forgetting 
Essentially I have a HDRI with matching backplate/s and a vehicle and wish to composite them together. In the past I made the ground plane shaders vector = ‘Window’ and Alpha Overed etc. But the overall workings just ain’t in my head anymore O_o
I’m obviously missing something and as it’s probably a year ago and there’s probably been advances since with the nodes and compositor. Can anyone please give me a guide, or a blend as to what steps to take to do this extremely beautiful common 3D technique please?
If there is a correct way of doing this it’d be great as I’ve been told several times that there will probably never be a ‘Shadow Catching Material/Shader or Shadow Catching Plane’ for Cycles - at least it’s not in the pipeline.
Thanks, Jay 
Well it’s nice to be able to answer your own question ain’t it? 
I found a recent tutorial:
I’m not sure of the guys name, but thanks all the same!
To save everyone having to watch the whole vid, I’ve broken it down to one screen shot - if you have an idea what you’re doing then you shouldn’t have any issues setting it up. It’s the easiest node set up for this technique I’ve seen and it’s pretty flawless.
You may wish to add a little colour to the plane for some bounced light and maybe add some extra nodes for colour correction.
I corrected mine in Post mostly - it’s only a five minute rough though, but as you can see it has potential 
The colour corrected render:
And the Node setup:
Good luck, and I hope we’ll have more vehicles, robots or whatever rendered into real photos or animations in Blender.
Jay
Very well done…I was really onto something like that, and I found this just in time. Thanks.
Hey Dude. Thanks for the help though it doesn’t completely solve my problem. I’m using a backplate but I want it to be projected on a plane so the ground is reflected correctly in my object. When I do this the plane gets a different color and the reflection of my object is a lot darker. Everything looks out of place. Maybe you have a solution for this problem?
Hello my friends,
I just did a tutorial about how to get proper shadows in Blender Cycles. http://youtu.be/0-IoIYsyba4
Some render layers are needed for subtractive compositing.
On http://www.blendswap.com/blends/view/68138 there is an example file for integrating cg into real footage with proper shadows.
Happy Blending!
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