For better experience make sure that HD button is turned on(it should be on when you play it) and watch it in full screen mode.

I hope you enjoy it. Cheers!

Here we have to images. The first one is the background and the other is a cut out picture of a girl. Both images are from Vyonyx website. So we need to blend those two together.

The girl was photographed somewhere on the street (probably ) and then taken into photoshop so that the background can be removed. But the problem is after the background is removed and the girl is putt onto another image the edges are too harsh.  Lets take a look at her shoulder.

As far as i have seen on an actual photograph where people were actually there the transition is much softer. So we need to blur but not the whole image. Just the edges. Here is the trick.

You need to Control + Click on the girl layer icon to select the edges of the image.

Now we go Select/Modify/Border… In the dialog i’ve putt 3 pixel border for this image. It really depends on the resolution and the effect you are after. So you need to play around with that.

We got out selection. Now what ever we do to the girl image its only going to affect the edges. And thats perfect for what we want. Now that we have that the only thing left to do is to blur the edges. So go Filter/Blur/Gaussian Blur… I gave it a 1 pixel blur. Be careful not to overdo the blur because it can cause problems. The skin is most affected in my opinion so when you are bluring look at the skin, the face or the fingers. You can create kinda of a glow effect so be careful.

Of course this is not a final composit. This is just one step in making a good composit. There are other stuff that you need to do but ill leave that for another time.

I hope that you found this little tutorial usefull.

Cheers!

You can do all sorts of things in photoshop, you can clone the background, you can take a brush and just brush out the colored parts, you can crate alpha maps but i found a really simple and effective way to do that in photoshop.

So here is an image that has almost white background but not completely white.  A great tool in photoshop to quickly make it white is called “Replace Color..” You can find it if you go Image/Adjustments/Replace Clolor… Now when you click on that you get a dialog that looks like this

First thing that you are interasted in here are the 3 color pickers. The first one is for the general color. You need to pick the background with this. So you click on an almost white part of the background with it and you get something like this.

Now the preview image is diferent. What this is telling us is that the white parts of the image will be affected and the black parts will not. We are almost done here. But nottice that in the upper right corner of the image we still have some parts that are not completely white so they will not be completely affected. So we need to add those as well. Select the middle color picker and pick that part. This color picker is for adding aditional clolors to the selection and the last clolor picker is for subtracting colors if you over did it. After we selected the remaining part we should get something like this.

One thing that i found really good about this method is that the shadows are fixed very very good.  When removing the background with a brush or cloning you can see where you have brushed in the shadows but not with this method.  Now all we need to do is crank the lightness slider all the way to the right and we are done!

I hope that you find this tip usefull.

Cheers!

Take this scene for example. Ive modeled a very very simple scene here so no modeling awards .  Ive used a vray sphere light to simulate a sunlight and did a render with no GI and it looks like this

Then i turned on GI and had a lit scene.

So basicly in this case what i did is i used GI to light my scene or the way i like to call it, i used GI as a light source. Only sunlight is there and nothing more. There are a lot of things that are wrong here. But most of all the end result is not as good as it can be. And thats what we are interasted the most. In this case if we want more light than we increase bounces or we use color mapping methods like exponental and boost lights and darks in exponental to get a good result but in that case what i find is that the textures are not natural, they are too washed out, too bright/dark and not the way they look on the image.

Photographers have a perfect light source called Natural Sunlight and still do a lot of fakes to make their interior photographs look as good as they can be. So if they have perfect natural light and still dont get the result they are after how can you acheve good result with just GI?

Lets light our scene again. First thing first, skylight. In nature there is no separate lightsource called skylight, its just sunlight bouncing off the air particles. But in 3D we do those lights separately.  So i added a big planar vray light behind the window to simulate a skylight and we get this.

Then i added a sunlight.

Now ive seen a lot of photographs where even in the daylight the lights in the interior (the lamps and so on) are turned on. So lets do that. We have 4 lamps on the front wall and one main light on the ceiling. So lets turn those on.

Now compare the first image in this post to the one above. Notice the diference? And i still haven’t turned on the GI. As ive said before, GI is used to “fill in the gaps” or to bounce the light that is allready in the scene. So lets turn on GI.

Much better than the second image in this post in my opinion.  Perhaps the above image is not the best lit scene you have seen but its a tutorial scene and its there to prove a point. Also now you have control over skylight, sunlight and the interior lights and you can tweek them as needed.

I hope that you can find this post usefull.

Cheers!

SimpleRenderTunning

I recorded this for a friend quite some time ago so its a waste just to sit on my harddrive. It is very basic so keep that in mind. You can download it from this link.

http://rapidshare.com/files/290715097/Simple_Render_Tunning.rar

Cheers!

Cheers!