International Trucks
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Overview
Capturing product photography of trucks has long been difficult due to photo shoot challenges of traveling vehicles, permitting and location fees, and environment and weather risks. Photo real CGI eliminates many of those issues, and brings additional benefits to the production workflow, such as the ability to more easily customize vehicles per application.
Approach
For a photo real CGI workflow to fully substitute photography, the CGI quality standards must be high. This means capturing a real location, whether on-site or through a high-quality stock image, is paramount. Over time, the assets built and acquired start to add up, and the efficiency of creating CGI imagery and video makes it an obvious decision.
With an increased supply of quality stock photography shot for the purpose of CG integration, product imagery can include much more variety than previously possible. My process always starts with sourcing the backplate and using a vehicle placeholder to get a sense of the scale and angle of the vehicle through the lens.
Fully integrating the vehicle into the shot is a fun collaboration between the creative direction and the lighting/look development artist. On a typical photoshoot, reflector cards would used to amplify the natural light into key areas on the vehicle such as the grill and hood, and the process here is no different. Using the HDRI capture, we can match the lighting of the scene pretty well to start, but we still need to add the polish elements that really make an image look real, such as key reflections, natural warping of elements such as truck trailers, and motion blur.
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International HX VFX integration, concrete application. This image not only required CG product, but also CG scene elements cush as the silos to feel native to a concrete factory.
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see also
