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While photo objects—photos of people or things with clearly-defined, masked boundaries—are typically used directly within page layout, image editing, presentation or Web page creation applications, they can also literally be brought to life by integrating them within scenes created by 3D applications.
In this article I'll demonstrate how I created the Presenter & Mini illustration using an image from PhotoObjects.net, Photoshop and Maxon's Cinema 4D (demo versions are available on the Maxon site).
When using a photo object within a 3D environment, you are combining the static perspective of the photo, which has a fixed angle, with the dynamic perspective provided by 3D, which lets you freely change the angle. So just as you select a photo object image for use within a design, you need to choose images which will work with your chosen 3D compositing methodology. Questions to ask include: Are both feet on the ground? Is the angle head-on? Will there be reflection or refraction? Do you want to cast from the photo object or receive shadows on it? These kinds of questions must be answered before you begin using a photo object within a 3D application.
To begin the Presenter & Mini illustration I began by selecting an image from PhotoObjects.net to play the role of Presenter. Her feet are both on the ground at about the same placement in the Z axis, meaning one foot isn't ahead of the other. Though she's obviously drawing attention to something on her left, as the camera's subject she was captured relatively head on.
In Cinema 4D the Presenter image was mapped onto a plane and placed on a floor, with three-point lights and a camera completing the basic scene setup. To reconcile the issue of static and dynamic perspective, adding a target expression to the presenter image and attaching the camera to that target expression ensured that no matter where I moved the camera in 3D space, the presenter was always facing the camera.
I next added the Mini. The presenter is both casting a soft shadow on the Mini as well as reflecting its passenger-side door. The Mini has been positioned and rotated to strike a "money shot" pose, as well as complement the Presenter. It was nice, but it still needed some glamor.
An image of rectangles was added to the color, diffuse and reflection channels of a material, which was then applied to the floor. This added some reflection interaction between the Presenter, Mini and the floor. Additional colored lighting now shone from above.
Finally, two arrays of volumetric lights were placed in the distance. Each array was made of instance copies of one original volumetric light placed in a tube. These light arrays are just aesthetic and have their illumination turned off. So you see them, but they don't light anything. To add those magical glowing blooms, post-render highlights were activated.
To ensure that the Presenter's flesh tone could be controlled independently of the 3D lighting in Cinema 4D, the presenter was given an object buffer. Multi-Pass Rendering was enabled and the file was output from Cinema 4D as a multi-layered PSD Photoshop image. The PSD image was then opened in Photoshop and, using the object buffer that was added to the Presenter in Cinema 4D, the Presenter's mask allowed me to adjust the skin tone with Photoshop's Hue/Saturation controls.
The finished image is shown below (click to enlarge).
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Larry Mitchell is the author of the tutorial-based Cinema 4D 9: Real-World 3D Animation Production, to be published by Charles River Media in November, 2005. This book also includes a DVD-ROM with over 30 hours of video tutorials, covering every tutorial in the book as well as trial versions of all software used in the tutorials. You can learn how to create imagery as seen in this article, as well as build an aircraft and fly it aerodynamically, drive a car based on expressions, paint a head in 3D to make an alien species, build 3D virtual sets for television production, produce high volume quality character animation with minimum effort and build a playable 3D game that you can even publish online.
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