Penny Rain

Overview

I love trying to composite fictional characters into reality (cry). Sometimes in the process of compositing a character into a real-life photo, I feel like the characters have come to life… as though my monitor has become “their reality”.

The background photographs of these works were taken on the UPenn campus, as I wanted to try and build a connection as though the characters were students like I am — traversing the campus every day… waiting for a friend beside a building… having a walk in the rain near the Penn Museum…

Workflow

For some technical stuff, here’s my own workflow for CG compositing of virtual characters:

First, rig the character in Blender, and set up the real-life image as the background plane of the virtual camera (making sure the resolution and focal length are the same), then start posing the character and looking for a good composition. After I’m happy with the composition and the general shot, I try to replicate the lighting and shadows, as if the character had always been a part of the original image. A lot of the time this involves rebuilding some geometry inside Blender to match the structures in the real photo. Finally, I go into DaVinci Resolve or Photoshop for some color-grading and post-processing.

(I didn’t make the character models, just rigged them! Character model credit to 椛暗)