UFO Sighting: Blender & Painters Studio Exercise
Hooray, long-awaited vacation starts today, and I’m looking at two weeks of super-fun time. To kick off, I experimented with compositing a rendered object onto a real-life scene. UFO sighting in my own neighbourhood!
Last month, I took this photo when I took my kids out into the park. (No, that’s not my kid on the swinger.) I thought it’d be a good shot for this project. A small alien spacecraft hovering just above that kid’s head.
Ready, set, go!
I’m using Blender 2.49, and Painters Studio 1.5.
First thing’s first. Get the camera’s focal length in 35mm equivalent. I own a small consumer-grade digicam, Canon PowerShot A480. It’s a 10Mpx toy, but it gives acceptable quality shots when there’s sunlight. It features a 2.5” CCD. I’ve found a neat 35mm equivalent convertor and used that to obtain the focal length of the widest angle for my camera’s lens: 39.6mm (on the lens itself, it says 6.6mm).
Entering the obtained value into Blender’s camera setting gives me the same kind of view on my 3D object as I would have with my own camera. Next, I’ve modeled the spacecraft, and set the lights up to match the scene lighting.
The test render against blue to check how it looks.
For the small lights around the craft, as well as the boosters on the bottom, I used a scaled duplicate of the spacecraft itself, and applied halo, a powerful little bastard that can give you all kinds of effects.
I’ve added the fill lights as well, so that the final render reflects the ambient it will live in.
The final compositing was done in Painters Studio. I’ve used the wave distortion plugin provided by G’MIC plugin set to add the heat below the craft, and added thin smoke.
Tried not to over-edit the original image in order to avoid a fake look. Finally, added a small amount of HSV noise to the image in order to blend the rendered object into the slightly noisy photo.
