Day 51: Tricks of the trade

Tips for compositing CG into live background plate.

Try to almost always add a little bit of blur to the CG, CG renders tend to be too sharp where as in real life what we capture from the camera is always blurred somehow, motion blur, depth blur etc...

After importing the CG render good idea to add a gau blur of less than 2 px, but it really depends on the scene. The bigger the scene the more blur and if it's moving super fast compare to slow movements and so on.

Lightwrap, this will help integrate CG into the background plate by blurring out the edges of the CG and letting light from the background plate affect the CG render.

Adding grains to the composition or the CG renders itself can help sell it better. It's little imperfections that helps CG integrate into live background and sell the effect.

Lens Distortion, this is a more complex technique which could be used to help enhance the shot. Basically  the live background plate have to be undistorted first, comp all the CG stuff and add a final lens distortion.

Edge blur, sometimes the edges of CG renders are just too sharp so you might wanna blur out just the edges to help soften the edge and make it integrate better.