Got all excited about compositing and cycles from all the Mango goodness. Since I’m an amateur photographer as well I thought combining photographs and Blender models should be fun. Anyway, this is my first result:
The little Blender branded guy is modeled, the rest is a macro image which I did some time ago. I wanted to use Cycles for this which was not the most easy thing for me. Throughout researching tutorials and references I got the feeling that compositing with Blender internal is much easier at the moment. But I got it done somehow. Still much to learn for me as several things could be improved and in the future I want to have more “interaction” between the image and the scene, like occlusions and more complex shadows.
For rendering I used two layers, full global illumination and 256 samples.
You can see a higher resolution image and download the blend file (should contain all textures) on my blog.
btw, really a nice picture! bravo
cycles is so good that one could think that everything is cg in this shot!
pay attention to the ground shadow of your box-man, to me it’s the main (only?) flaw in this image
No, you also need to match the extremely shallow depth of field better, but the texturing i very good and the lighting is near to spot on. Very nice.
Hmm, how do you render a shadow for comp in Cycles? Perhaps on a separate layer on a white groundobject then compositing it between the back- and foreground plate using multiply? …or is there a way to create a shadow material using light paths perhaps?
the character is very close to Cartobox in Yotsuba &!
(see also 365 Days of Danboard, photographs by Arielle Nadel based on comic by Kiyohiko Azuma “Yotsuba &!”).
I was fighting a lot with the ground shadow. I used a white plane for the ground and rendered that as a separate layer. Then composited it with the rest, check out the blend file to see for yourself. I had a lot of problems with it though and am not completely happy with how it turned out.
Depth of field was also tricky, as 2.61 does not have the f/stop functionality and I couldn’t figure out how to compute the radius for f2.8 which was used in the source image.
I guess with the next Blender version with all the current improvements to cycles this will get much easier
Still having a hard time with the correct DOF…