Car Compositing Using Blender Cycles

Here’s a short little animation that tests the composition of a car into live video footage.

https://youtu.be/zK2nW2uGsGo

Sorry, but this looks horrible. You could’ve tried to make it convincing at least as still shot…

What exactly makes it look horrible? I’d like to know so that I can focus on improving in the future.

I think it’s:

  • wrong perspective - the car doesn’t match the surroundings (angles and fov).
  • wrong shadows - the car looks plastered over the background, especially rear wheel area.
  • poor camera tracking - the car floats all over the background with each camera movement.
    By the way there are tons of vids with good compositing out there, and they can at least help you notice when your results are not up to par.

Well most important thing (What makes this video terrible): It is not correctly placed on the road (Looks like left back wheel is deep under ground). Shadow under car is way off also. And camera tracking is done terribly (car is moving against the ground when it should not).

If you solve the above things then you should definitely improve materials and lighting

Well, thanks for the notes. Here’s my response:
-wrong perspective: I’d agree. The perspective is a bit off. However, I’m not sure what I could have done differently. I mean, I estimated how it should look with my eyes and I used BLAM to ensure that the perspective was correct.
-wrong shadows-Again, you’re not wrong. I was trying to cut down on render time by simply rendering the car and then duplicating it, scaling it down and turning it black for the shadows. I guess I should avoid doing that in the future.
-poor camera tracking-Now, I would say that “floats all over the background” is a bit of an overstatement. All I’ve managed to notice was a slight bounce in the car’s movement across the entire animation. Before, you said that I could have at least locked the camera down for a more realistic result. However, the motion tracking was pretty important to me, considering I spent a lot of money on tracking software. :slight_smile:

And here’s a little note for you, next time, when you’re critiquing someone’s work, try to avoid use of the word “horrible.”