As you can see, the ground plane is still too dark. You can now adjust the ground planes luminosity and diffuse channels until the surface of the ground integrates seamlessly with the photo. It takes a few tweaks and renders but I found upping the luminosity to between 17 and 18% gave me a seamless integration - Fig.09
Fig.09
Step 5: -3D Objects:
Now is a good time to save your scene and all objects!
Now we have successfully completed our ground plane, you can add 3D objects on top of this plane and their shadows will cast onto the ground - integrating them into the scene. For this, I choose a classic mirror ball, nothing fancy - just a sphere with a high reflective value, and “ray tracing + spherical map” applied in environment options of it’s surface, and the background image was chosen as the reflection map - Fig.10
Fig.10
Render a frame and you can see how well the 3D elements have integrated into the original photo - Fig.11
Fig.11
3DTotal
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For extra realism, rotate the reflection map on the mirror ball 180 degrees and tweak the surface diffuse and reflection channels to match as you want.|
Obviously, this is just the basics. Extra geometry could be added so that you can catch shadows on different elements in the image, and different lighting would require either more or less ambient light, so you would have to tweak your Sliders until you find out what works best!
