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What's the best practice nowadays to put credible looking people (and occasionally arms and hands only) in product and furniture renderings? Are there credible 3D people one can purchase, ready to use in Maxwell Studio (or Rhino, Alias, Pro/E)? Or does one buy 2D people and then spends time photoshopping shadows, etc. in? What would you recommend?

Put photoshop people on planes works, Ive done it a few times, setup the reflection plane at 90 with.. tags. Works for distant zoomed in stuff, also target the planes to follow the active camera.. this is a bit advanced for studio though. Its also nice to add a few 'gobo' people then fill in with PS people.

I see... Planes with alpha mask and image at 90° to the camera should be straightforward for stills, especially wit some motion blur. Shadows off for these people-planes, I guess. What's with that gobo technique? I only know gobos from film; so why would one project a silhouette (onto what?) and then fill the projection in with PS? What sort of intriguing fake-3D-people trickery is this?

Shadows off for these people-planes, I guess

Not really, mostly shadows on, though it depends on the light.. heres an example, some real people, some PS and some people on planes (aka 'gobos')

This is one of four shots so the people on planes rotate to face whichever camera is active.



Shame about clumsy compositing, there is some fringe goin on

Yes, the white fringing is quite noticeable, but with a bit of extra time one can probably get rid of it... Trickiest thing will probably be to find 2D people where the lighting and shadowing is baked so as to correspond to the scene's illumination. Too bad there don't seem to be affordable yet convincing 3D people on the market...