How to Add 3D Model in Real Image

How to Add 3D Model in Real Image by Tihomir Blajev, Bulgaria

Hello Readers, I’m very happy to create this tutorial and sharing my knowledge with you.

First of all I’d like to share that I’d rather concentrate on the presentation, toning and compositing, not so much on the modeling, because you could find online a lot of info which will teach you how to do it. Also the car model and brand is quite popular, so there are plenty of drawings and images related to it.

For starters first comes the lightning and placing the 3D model in the scene. If you want to insert a 3D model into an existing photo, you’d need to find a suitable photo for it. I personally found mine in Google search. Once I found it, next is to adjust the 3D model according to the existing photo. For this purpose there are 2 popular ways in the 3ds Max: camera match or to adjust the picture manually. I chose the second one, but you can choose the first one too: you would need at least 5 points and camera points of the model for proper positioning of the camera. After a short adjustment in perspective view and then use the orbit tool I achieved the desired position of the 3d object in the scene and proceeded to illuminate the scene.

The second important thing is to capture the shadows of the 3d object since they will give you the right feel, volume and correct perception in a 3d scene.

The ground was not rendered as part of the scene, it was treated as a matte object and only visible for reflections. My background image was converted to HDRI and adjusted in Photoshop for the reflections override. In this case I used the plane with marked boxes Matte object in VRay properties menu object itself; of course the object must be properly positioned against the car and in the correct perspective.

You need to select an appropriate texture for this plane and set the parameters itself VrayMtl. In this case I choose the texture of Asphalt with a suitable scale; here are settings for the VRayMtl.
Here are the settings in Vray Properties menu item for matte object:

Final position of the 3d object, in our case Audi:

Lighting is pretty standard, common and easy in this case, I used VRay sun and two VRayLight, Vray HDRI in the environment slot and in render slot, try to make the nice reflection, because sometimes bad reflections can kill the realism.

Range and the camera are standard but as you can see I reduced the intensity of the sun. Little trick to use the correct color of light depends on the background image. Here are the settings for the stage lighting.

The third thing is because I wanted a dynamic picture adding motion blur on the tires and on the wheels and don’t want to add the effect during post work in Photoshop. You need to read a little about the use of this dynamic effect on the Internet to get the correct effect, using VRay 1.5 SP5. You can read about the motion blur on www.spot3d.com where you will get the official online HELP manual for Vray render Engine and other ChaosGroup products. I will show my settings but keep in mind that they are specific to the 3d scene and may vary.

The image was rendered using Vray, and the setup is quite simple. The car materials where heavily tuned after the many render test to give the desired look. Here are some of the settings of main materials from the scene.

Chrome Material



Car Paint

Tyre Material

Let’s now turn to the final part of the preparation process and render the scene, the whole scene was rendered in V-ray and that is the slowest part of CG for all of us, on next page you can see the render settings.

A very important and fun part of creating CG images is the post work. For this purpose I used the Adobe Photoshop and a plug-in to it by named Nik software Color Efex Pro 3.0

In Photoshop I used Levels and Curves and finally a very slight chromatic aberration by Lens Correction. I want to make more interesting images and I use some effects filters of Color Efex Pro 3.0 - Ink - Bi color filter - Cross balance - Film effects 

In the end I hope I’ve been a little helpful with modest tutorial and I hope you liked. Thank you for taking the time to read it.