Hey all, here is a project I did a few months ago and I figured I would show off a bit. All the sets/spaceships are done entirely in Blender.
Cycles let me have the best process for this workflow. I would chroma-key the puppets backgrounds out, and then export as alpha channeled avi files, then I imported the puppet footage and put them into the environments as flat objects. Thus the puppets can move in and around the objects easily, in addition to casting reflections and shadows.
A lot of this was a bit of a test project and since it worked I’m planning on making more. But as a fun little tech demo it worked out pretty well.