You can probably cutout a bit of material from the photograph and slap it on a simple object (wall, pillar, car) to layer the photo.

If you are able to partially obscure an object (place on balcony, place behind pillar) that would help.Using 3D objects that are easily recognisable, drawn at the correct scale and that fit the scene helps to trick the eye.Whether you use dull or reflective objects, you would need to model some ground cover to ‘anchor’ the objects (clump of grass, puddle, rock, small objects obscuring the connection with the ground plane basically).The problem with reflective objects is that they would need to also reflect the ground plane (grass, concrete, etc.). If you have an HDRI of the area the photo was shot in at the same time of day, you could use more reflective objects.I couldn’t get this right and instead kept using the viewport render which worked okay. But I didn’t want the 3D tree and 3D building to leave a shadow over the shadowcatcher plane directly as those shadows were already in the photograph. I wanted the 3D tree and the 3D building to cast shadows over the Monkeys onto the shadowcatcher plane so those monkeys look darker than the ones in direct sunlight. To render both the camera background and the 3D scene, you can use Composer: Note the monkeys are 100% identical same size and same material. Note the tree will no longer cast shadows on the building as the building is 100% transparent. Shadows will continue to be cast on monkeys. To make the 3D tree and building completely transparent simply change the Alpha value of the material to 0. This has nothing to do with receiving shadows, like we did earlier with the transparent ‘shadowcatcher’ material ground plane.ĭon’t forget for transparent materials you will need to set the material properties like so: Note the semi-transparent 3D building and tree being used to cast shadows on some of the monkeys. The diffuse color controls the shadows’ intensity. The color ramp controls the shadows’ gradient. Note: You need to be in 3D Viewport Shading mode and play with HDR rotation, sun light strength and sun light direction. To render the ground plane as transparent yet preserve the received shadows, you can apply a ‘shadowcatcher’ material: Objects casting shadows on other object.You cannot place 3D objects behind things in the photo įor that to work you would need to model and texture in 3D.You now have a Blender scene containing a camera with a background image where the perspective matches the photo image perspective.Īdd a plane to match the image photo ground level. Here you see Chipp Walters adjusting the Z axis arrow to match a 900mm high kitchen bench.

You can skip this step if it you can eyeball your 3D objects placed in the scene, where it doesn’t matter if an object is 10cm or 1 meter to scale. If you want the units / scale of your 3D scene to match real life measurements, you need to adjust the length of one of the arrows of the 3D cursor (X, Y or Z) with an object in the photograph and tell fSpy the length of that object. Note: The 3D origin will be placed where the 3D cursor is positioned.

I helps if the photo contains geometric objects placed oriented along an XY plane. Make sure the ground plane is visible and the camera is looking down on the ground plane. Often the idea is to place 3D objects on a ground plane.

Use the input image as the camera background.Set the camera viewport to match the dimensions of the input image.Here’s an outline of the automated process it helps perform: This allows you to place 3D objects as if they were part of the background image.įSpy is an open source still image camera matching utility. Blender / fSpy camera matching (still image)Ĭamera Matching adjusts a camera viewpoint so that the perspective in a background image matches the perspective of the 3D world.

Rendering an object on a photo blender