Once camera matched, a 'sun' has to be inserted. Use either a shadow casting spot light or shadow casting omni light for this. If you have the correct O.S. information and time of day the photo was taken you may even choose to use 3DS's resident Sunlight system. This will save time and effort in manually positioning a free light. Personally, I prefer to use a single omni light. The illumination value was set to 1.2 with a medium-high ambient lighting. Turn on ray traced shadows. Now you'll have to do several test renders (at a lowish resolution without anti- aliasing) to match up shadow angles and lighting levels with the backround photograph. When you're happy with the scene add any trees, cars and people that you may want to include. The final render can now be done against the original high resolution backround photograph. I usually render out at around 3000x2250 pixels, TIFF format. The above image shows this stage except i've toned down the backround for extra clarity.




Photoshop time! First off a layer of just the render has to be positioned on top of the photograph. The way I normally do this is to invoke the CHANNELS box under WINDOW > SHOW CHANNELS and click on the alpha channel (the black and white one). Now mask off the alpha channel (as shown in the image), go back on to the RGB channel and SELECT > INVERSE and COPY. You now have an anti-aliased copy of your render in the image buffer. Open up your original high resolution backround photograph and paste the new image directly over the top. This will now create it's own layer. The render from 3DS can now be closed down.



We are now at the stage where experience and artistic flair count for everything. First of all the model has to be finally scaled and squashed to fit the photograph. You will find tool for this under the EDIT > TRANSFORM menus. Then as I say, it's basically up to you. In this example the colour saturation, curves and contrast were adjusted to match, then edges were first softened by using the earaser tool with a small soft brush. Several semi-translucent layers and effects were subtly over lapped and flattened in together with maybe a slight noise and blur filter in certain places to anchor the render down even more. Another good tip is to use the stamp tool or to 'steal' bits of the original photograph onto the render. This works to great effect. The montage is now basically finished but don't fiddle too much or else it will look too super-imposed.


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