Joint project with a student

An interesting opportunity came up this year. City Hall in Dahlonega contacted UNG's art department asking if a student could help out with a project they were working on. It seems there's a project to complete a walking path around the local reservoir and one of the first steps is to build a pedestrian bridge over a creek that leads into the reservoir so people don't have to walk in the road. For some reason, they wanted a good rendering of what the bridge would look like to get the project moving along. There was money available, so I hired a student and paid him. It would be some great professional work experience.

The project was simple enough, so I figured only one student was needed. I chose one that had the skills required. Vaughan Duncan was a senior and very capable artist. I had him build and render an accurate enough version of the bridge in Maya. I took the photo to use as a background plate. I acted as the liaison between the student and the rep from City Hall. We worked according to their specifications and ended up with a nice end result. Compositing the rendered passes of the bridge into the photo would be a bit complicated, so I took care of that part. The end result was pretty good and just what they wanted. This was a good example of what we are teaching in our Digital Arts program and I hope some good PR for the university. 

The final image turned out quite good, so I made a tutorial based on it, showing how to composite a CG rendered element into a photo and make the whole thing look realistic and seamless.

Click here to read about the project.

Click here to watch my tutorial on best practices to comp CG renders into a photographic plate.