I just finished a composition Project where I tried to use the new Indigo features render_foreground_alpha & render_region in my composition chain...
The model is taken from "Half Life 2: Episode 2" no modeling by me here!!!
But based on the normal Map of the model I generated an enhanced Bump Map, using CrazyBump, having the details from Normal Map & Bump Map into one map used here...
A 1080p version can be found on my Gallery
The main task in this project was to get a composition done by keeping a DOF Blur, so check out the result...
For the glowing Eyes I took seperated the Mesh and took the texture color information as light source with very very low Effiancy Scale.
Here some details of this Process:
I had to do 3 renderings in Indigo.
1) The main image with my models floating in the env_map Sphere, to have them illuminated also from the Bottom.
2) A render_foreground_alpha pass, that surprisingly needed some time because of the DOF :/
3) For the Shadows The main Scene together with an (totally) white ground plane was rendered, using render_region to keep Focus on the needed parts. I changed the model material to a 100% black diffuse mat to reduce rendertime, and tweaked the Render settings for less accuracy and higher max change.
3.1) Because the most HDR Env Maps you'll find have not enough dynamic light Information even if the main and only light source is the Sun an image rendered using this env_map causes no hard shadow because the rest of the image lights the scene "to much" check the previous attempt on this composition here. To prevent this I used The HDRShop filter AbsHDR in Picternaut to reduce my env_map to the main light(s) and used this hdr_env_map for the shadow pass. Here my HDR env_map source.
4) finally I had to composite the background. Because the env_map gets totally blured by the DOF, I had to do a render of the BG without DOF Blur, what I did in C4D to save the time... Indigo takes way to long on simple light source rendering. then I rendered a Depth Pass in C4D to fit to the Indigo DOF and aplied a DOF Blur on the image using Photosop, based on the Depth pass.
Now the foreground is sharp, just as the Hunter model standing there.
5) Finaly for the composition in Photoshop I worked as long as possible in 32bit to be as accurate as possible regarding the blurred mask.
Some Post Produktion and tweaking still was necessary, because my final BG (an 8000x4000 LDR env_map) had another coloration than my camera tonemapped Indigo output...
