After Taking the first set of photographs I realized that the shadows were too dark, and that I really didn’t like how the shadows are so faded in the plate. I didn’t really worry much about the difference in intensity of the shadows as I only needed to match the object on the clean plate

The Chrome ball Photo is created by taking 7 different exposures of the chrome ball and put together into an HDR using Photoshop, The photo is then cropped into a square where all sides of the crop is touching the chrome ball.

When lining up the box to the plate we have to make sure that the box is the same size as the box taken in the photograph

Then we have to line up the lighting of the sphere to the sphere plate. Used a sphere as it is easier to see shading and bounce light in a sphere than any other simple shape.

Ran into a Problem with the shadow plate as I forgot to take a photo of a shadow plate and do not have the right light for the shadow. This is important because without a shadow plate when the object shadow goes over the key light shadow it creates a double shadow and is not real as there are only one shadow being created in the scene.

Fixed the problem by going into Photoshop and doing a rough fix on to where the shadow will interact with the environment shadow. While the Photoshop is rough because of how the ground wood has variance in colors it shouldn’t be too much of a problem when integrating it

I then created a rough mask of the Environment shadow that will be projected onto the ball, because of how the shadow doesn’t have to line up perfectly onto the object if there is a little bit of difference between the two plates it should be fine.

But if there is a huge difference and the plate looks fake then you would need to change it.

Luckily because of how my lighting is as long at the shadow is somewhat on the right spot it is hard to tell if the environment shadow is wrong.

This Environment plate is then projected through the render camera and then rendered by a camera on the light and then that render is projected onto the objects through the lights

This leads where I added both the shadow plate and the environment lights onto the sphere and see if the shadow is properly on the sphere

To start off I put the basketball into a new Maya scene so that I can work on the shaders of the Ball. I made a bump map from an image in Pintrest. The UVs of the Basketball is not really the best as I got it from a free 3d model site, so I re UV’d the textures and got the basketball to look good. I then took that Shader and put it into an FBX to import it into houdini

The first thing that I noticed about the Render when putting it into nuke was that the ball was too saturated and stood out too much in the scene. I then changed the ball color so that it would be darker and somewhat blend with the color of the floor.

I thin that the reason I decided to make this change is because how we remember Basketballs to be the balls that the NBA uses so when I used my rubber basket ball as the reference it looks like a fake plastic basket ball.

To solve this problem I decided to change the color back into a tone that is recognizable that fits with the scene.

I then also applied a edge blur and a light wrap on the ball so that it would integrate better to the scene.