Direction and Position

Direction and Position

These examples use simple 8-bit 3D elements rendered on
a single pass. The skill of dealing with these is a basic skill
of compositing—color matching—but it’s not as if, having
mastered this skill, you are prepared to match anything
anywhere. An ideal element generated in 3D software
would of course have multiple passes, giving you more
control (Chapter 12); even short of that, if the lighting and
perspective of an element are wrong, there’s no practical.


On the other hand, compositing has consistently freed artists
from spending too long hanging around in 3D software
trying to solve everything. shows the simplest
solution to the previous problem: match the camera angle
and basic lighting by observing what’s in the scene. From
looking at the pool balls and shadows, it seems apparent
that there are a couple of overhead lights nearby and that
the one off camera right is particularly strong.


I match the angle by placing the background shot into the
background of the 3D software’s camera view, and I make
sure that there are a couple of lights roughly matched to
that of the scene so that they produce the correct shading
and specular highlights. From there, I have an element
that does not match perfectly, but I’m done with what I
need to do in 3D if I want to be done.
More complex and dynamic perspective, interactive lighting,
animation, global illumination, and so on certainly
make more things that can be done in 3D, yet at the end
of the day, the smart computer graphics artist kicks a
scene over to 2D as soon as the elements are within range