composition

[darkChief]

I want to composite a can into several pictures. One of the pictures has someone holding a can, the other has a can on someones palm. I have no idea were start, what are the steps i need to composite, I'm guessing it's a mixture of lightwave and photoshop.

Mambo

[Surrealist.]

Load up the image in the BG in Layout (more windows comositing options or ctl F7) and use it as a reference.

Turn this on in the Camera View area of the display options - Camera View BG to Background image.

Set your render properties in the camera options to the same size as the image and to the resolution of your final output.

Now choose a setting for the camera lense and try and match it to the photo, that is the same depth type of lense etc. Lots more info to be had for this. You can try a search of the forum if you don't get any good answers here. But bottom line is you have to have a similar at best camera set up.

Then position your camera and object to match the real world camera using the Bg image as a reference.

Light it.

Now there are several ways to do this. I am not an expert but I know that you can either a) fake it with lights and radiosity or b) use some kind of HDRI type of lighting that basically takes the image info and produces light to match. Again try a search here. There is plenty of info on this.

When you render the scene, you may be happy with the reslutls right out of Lightwave.

If not use Photoshop. To do this all you have to do is select Save Apha with at render and use that as a mask in photoshop. It will automatically save a B&W image around the shape of the can object. Saving as a 32 bit image Targa as an example will also save an alpha with the image.

Those are the basic steps and others with more experience will hopefully enlighten on more details.

Final note: Use the resolution multiplier in the camera properties to set the resulution to 50 - 25 % of the image size for test renders.

[darkChief]

Thanks a lot, that was really helpful:thumbsup: :D .