Create a Snail - Blender 2.5 - page 299

Objective Complete - Mini Debriefing
In this task, we performed various adjustments and addiions to the scene to get it ready for
composiing. We started by adding a curve to deform the shape of the body of the snail via
a modiier, followed by adding a plane below the snail and seing its material to only render
the shadow (not the color) to make it easy to compose the render over the live footage. We
then proceeded to configure the camera, to get the right framing for the shot, and the lamp,
to get it afecing only the specular component of the shader and casing some shadows.
Then we worked on the world seings to add some ambient occlusion (difuse lighing) and
set its quality. Finally, we adjusted the resoluion of the render to play nicely with the live
footage over which we are going to put our snail.

Compositing

To inish our project, we only need to perform some basic composiing to get the rendered
snail nicely integrated into the live footage used as the background.

Engage Thrusters
1. Let's switch to the Compositing screen to get a Node Editor available.

2. Now go to the Node Editor , select the Compositing Nodes opion from the type

of setup that we are going to create, and enable the Use Nodes checkbox to start
creaing the setup.
The default setup comes with two nodes—a Render Layers node directly
connected to a Composite node.

3. Let's hold Ctrl and click-and-drag with the let mouse buton cuing the curve
connecing them in order to separate them.
4. Let's now go to Add → Input → Image , then click on the Open buton of the Image
node and load the bg.jpg image; let's put this node below the Render Layers
node.
5. Now go to Add → Color → AlphaOver , move this node between the Render
Layers node and the Composite node and enable the Convert Premul opion.
6. Then connect the Image output from the Render Layers node into the lower
Image input socket of the AlphaOver node and the Image output from the Image
node to the upper image input socket of the AlphaOver node. Finally, let's connect
the Image output from the AlphaOver node to the Composite node. Let's also
check that the Fac parameter of the AlphaOver node is 1.0 .
Now we can press F12 to perform the render of our scene and get to see the nice result of
all the hard work we've put into it. Don't forget to save the file and the rendered image.