Complex shadow from live action onto 3D logo

[Mark Suszko]

Naw, this should not be so hard. I think Eran Stern or Maltanon has a tutorial on this in the COW tut section.

But think about this: you already have a perfect source for the shadow from the full-body matte you generated in the green screen.

All you really need is to take a separate instance (perhaps 2) of that matte, color it black, make it partly transparent and fuzz it up, then re-position it and warp it to appear to fall on the logo the way you want it to. For that, you could use AE or very possibly, Apple Motion.

[Scott Novasic]

I agree, you have the two main images with mattes already. THe text and the person. I did something similar but with more elements about 1\3rd
of the way through my demo reel with 3 news anchors from Fox (right after a simpsons animation i did) I had to ‘fake’ shadows falling on numerous things. The soft shadows dont have to be super accurate to be convincing to the eye. If you have individual mattes for both the face of the 3d text and the edges it helps as well depending on your lighting and the persons position to the image. I would not use warps to ‘bend’ the shadow as it falls on the logo due to the fact that there are probably 90 degree angles and sharper edges on the text, calling for more of a ‘cut’ shadow.

without seeing it, i cant be real specific.

good luck

SuperNova
Animation & Visual Effects
Scott Novasic
Los Angeles Ca
web:https://web.mac.com/finaleffects

[Hamish Boyd]

Thank you both for your quick replies… very helpful.

Scott, looking at your reel (which has huge amounts of awesome in it by the way), was the promo for the simpsons/seinfield with the presenter in the red jacket all done on green screen? If so are the shadows you have on the floor from him re-created or are they drawn from the actual shadows?

Thanks for your help.

[Scott Novasic]

thanks for the kind words on my reel. The actor in Red was shot against a plain white background BEFORE I was even hired at Fox. We used him a lot. So I was able to get some of it to key ‘ok’. but believe it or not, I did basic gargbage matting combined with individual hand drawn mattes, hundreds of them ( maybe thousands when I take into consideration the whole campaign ) I would paint in my own shadows on a lot of stuff. (I won a national Gold Promax for the campaign for our ‘Home of Comedy’ promos using him) All the animation I did was concepted to fit the ALREADY SHOT footage. It was a backwards way of working, but we pulled it off. Im pretty fast at cutting mattes so I sort of relish the challenge of projects like that. Some of my favorite work involves merging reality with cg elements. Theres a lot of it on my reel. I hope to get some more opportunities to do it here in LA as I continue to grow my animation company.

Thanks again Hamish.

SuperNova
Animation & Visual Effects
Scott Novasic
Los Angeles Ca
web:https://web.mac.com/finaleffects

[Mike Smith]

Would you have more control and maybe keep post costs down if you had a suitable size prop logo made ..?

[Hamish Boyd]

Not a bad idea. Have worked with prop logo’s rather than post before.
But knowing the client as I do, the more control I have in post the better.
🙂