Techniques for comping in silhouettes

[Dave Buckley]

Guys

 

i am comfortable at comping in stylised silhouette into my render, the only problem i have is the best way to use the same silhouette to create a shadow on the floor, i have tried to duplicate the layer and then use distort but it seems quite tedious to get the desired effect.

 

Does anyone have a tried and tested method to adding people with shadows into their renders???

 

Or does anybody know of any good tutorials

 

I don't need to worry about matching lighting on the people as they are stylised. personally i don't like realistic people in renders but perhaps i could be swayed an example of what i want can be found on the Pure Render website

 

http://www.purerender.com/archive/the+competition?page=1

[Stephen Thomas]

The only other way I can think of other than distorting in photoshop would be to have billboard or 3d people in your scene, hide them from camera but still casting shadows, then render out a seperate pass with just the people to generate an alpha for your silhouettes.

[Dave Buckley]

what i was getting at was whether everybody else just distorts another layer?? i was under the impression this is the best way to do it, but was hoping for quicker methods. i am still learning, i believe i can create actions for each shadow position to stop the process becoming reptitive but am yet to try it

[Crazy Homeless Guy]

I don't need to worry about matching lighting on the people as they are stylised. personally i don't like realistic people in renders but perhaps i could be swayed an example of what i want can be found on the Pure Render website

 

http://www.purerender.com/archive/the+competition?page=1

 

I think the majority of the comp'd people in Pure's imagery does not have direct light shadows, only contact shadows. Which in 70% of architectural images look better, but only because making good looking cast of shadows from people can be very difficult. And if done poorly, they distract from the image.

 

I haven't set this up yet, but here is the route I am planning on taking in the future to deal with this issue....

 

I want to take a few AXYZ people, and render out about 3000 shadow passes for each person. Maybe rotate the sun 4 degrees and render, rotate the sun 4 degrees, and render. Do this for 360 degrees, and then move the sun up 5 degrees, and complete the 360 degree rotation again. You should be able to set up a rig for this. Use that rig to do shadow passes for about 3 or 4 diffrent people (walking, standing, sitting, etc...) This will quickly give you an emense library of shadow passes for people from all sun angles.

 

You could use those, but the problem becomes that shadows have color, and a lot of people do nto account for this. So....

 

I plan setting myself up in the future to render shadows in a seperate pass, and then apply them in Photoshop, or whatever compositing application I am using. The I will appl the peole shadows to the shadow pass in an effort to get a better color match of the shadow color when applied to the image.

 

Again, I have not worked through the steps of this so I don't know how well it will work, but this is what I plan to do as soon as I get the render passes to work correclty in MR.

[JonRashid]

If you billboard shadows are automatic and you can use motion blur on billboard. Or render billboards as seperate pass/element and manipulate that layer in PS. I notice in a lot of the pure ones the reflection is cleaner than the character which motion blur would fix

[TheAllusionisst]

Automating a generic method can help quickly set up the scene and allow tweaking to match scene criteria, you can do this with PhotoShop’s “Actions” (scripting). Once you have worked out the basic procedure you can work on creating an action for placing your shadow/reflections every 45 degrees for flexibility in future projects. PhotoShop action’s can save you a lot of work in any repetitive task, other programs have similar features that you can use. Work smarter, not harder.

 

You start recording once you have your entourage inserted in the scene and are ready to start recording your actions for future use. Duplicate your entourage layer to create shadow and/or reflection layer, bottom out brightness and contrast, flip horizontally, distort shadow layer to lay out the direction you require, change opacity to 30%, apply Gaussian blur with 1.5 radius, move entourage image to top of layer order and CTRL-G to group layers and stop recording action. Now feel free to use the corresponding action each time you insert an entourage image without all the tedious steps.

 

Longer explanation: http://www.3dallusions.com/forums/tutorials/3254-entourage-composite-actions.html