Improving compositing

This is probably more about Photoshop than Brazil, except maybe about how best to break this up into passes....

I'm using the attached scene(just ignore the bad surface that failed to render) to test using HDRs and backplates, this being a little more 'advanced' than I've done before since the subject is in partial shadow. To get the shadows on the flying car I edited the HDR environment to get a shadow map and put it on part of a sphere, and added a directional sun light to get the shadows, and rendered out over the backplate. For the shadows on the object that looks pretty good I think, maybe a little too dark in this one, but the tricky part is getting the shadows from the car on to the ground. In the unedited shots you can see that there are sunny spots under the car that are part of the backplate, which should be totally gone, the end shadow should be the same as on the surrounding tarmac, maybe a little darker? All I could think to do was some manual Clone Stamp-ing them out, which is not exactly automatic and the end result's kind of meh. Any tips?

Attachments:

trek on road smaller.jpg, 307 KB
trek on road car and tree shadows.jpg, 561 KB
trek on road car shadow only.jpg, 567 KB

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Permalink Reply by Alan Crighton on February 10, 2012 at 7:15am

For your backround, simply setting the projection to spherical should yield a normal view image. Create a Basic Environment, then add add your HDRI image as the Background Image. The Projection drop down offers you 4 options, select Spherical. You may add a reflection to your materials using the same HDRI image. The example files attached show the difference of using the Automatic projection vs. the Spherical projection with the same HDRI. Using a HDRI image as the background image isn't ideal, especially if you plan on rendering a large image, as resolution simply isn't that great. Rather, using a 'backplate' image and a matching HDRI will provide a much better quality image.

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