GP2 Modeling, Rendering and Compositing Tutorial

Rendering for Compositing

Below is my global illumination object where I am going to place the GP2 car.

I added the lighting object. This object will be reflected on the car and helmet.

In the object properties I checked the UNSEEN BY CAMERA button, this will hide the actual object from the renders and unchecked cast shadow so that the object will not cast any shadow but will still be reflected on to the object.

Suface texturing

Car texture is one of the challenging object to textures, thankfully lightwave texturing has shaders that deals with this problem. I used angle of incidence, fast fresnel, layers of light incidence under specularity, OCCLUSION for the shades of shadows and so on. Usually its a trial and erroruntil I get the correct feel for the car painting. There are also a lot of preset surfacing on the net and Lightwave forums.

Lighting for this render is very simple, 1 directional light just for the purpose of specular highlights and 1 area light for the soft shadow casting. Both lights are placed on the top of the object.

Since I am going for compositing, this means I have a template photo to superimpose the final render. I followed the correct lighting position to cast the correct shadows according to the photo. For the camera, I took the EXIF info from the photo template and applied it to Lightwave camera, I input the same focal distance, focal point, depth of field etc.