This was a group assignment I contributed to at university. The task was to take a real image and add virtual objects to the image such that they blend into the scene. The above image is the final result of the assignment.

What do objects you think are real and not real?

Did we do a good enough job?

The real picture can be found below, compare the two to find out.

The work I contributed didn’t involve any programming, but the use of Maya to set up the scene and model the virtual objects.

Setting up the scene involved making a duplicate scene of the image in Maya and overlaying the image over the duplicate ‘real’ objects. In addition the camera angle was measured and the lighting information was taken (initally as some photoes that were later stitched together in photoshop to make a HDR map). With this the correct angle and lighting could be used inside of Maya.

Once that was done, the rest of my team was able to adjust the material information of the virtual objects to make them look right. Then differential rendering was used to create the needed relfections and shadows of them.