wide shot picture to show the actual scale of this figurine.
I tried to make sure that the angle would not be too strange between the figurine and the bulldozer. However the perspective of both pictures was a bit difficult for me to match them together.
Method I tried to make the two object blend. One I masked out the figure and brought it with the dozer.
The dozer was flipped around, since it would fit better with the pose of the figure.
Next I created three layer levels, the rocks as foreground, figure and dozer as middle ground, and as background layer, the trees (which I blurred it to create a sense of depth).
The color was adjusted to a point where both subject (dozer and figurine) were kind of separated color wise. Since the yellow and the red were too closely related with each other.
New modeling exercise (10/25/2011)
Chose the most obnoxious subject to model, STRAWBERRY! I chose the subject of a lego toy with the organic nature of strawberries to sort of blend the two together. In a way I wanted to composite the lego toy to a point that it looks natural around the strawberries.
Picture was taken on a canon G9 with manual settings, under controlled lighting, using two soft box light sets.
Begin, MAYA modeling of the Lego guy.
It is good to take note of the actual picture while you're modeling. As I went muscling through the modeling, I totally forgot the fact that in the actual footage, there are no legs to be modeled!!
Save time and reduce to the most simplified form. Since I am not animating this model but rendering it as a still image at the end.
Strawberry, the modeling process: Used a cube, increased smoothness and started to select different vertices for the seed extrusion. Making sure the seeds don't lie too close with neighboring ones.
The leaf was built on polygon plane, and leaves divided and extruded.
Raw render of the selected models.
After the modeling was lighted and textured, The next step was to render the models into passes, with the use of P_Z shader (Puppet shader, plugin that's been downloaded). The render was exported as separated file format relatively as shading pass, reflective pass, and etc.
The files were compiled and tweaked in NUKE to produce a different effect that would separate from the actual photo that was shown in the beginning of this post.

