Just like everyone doing 3D graphics for hobby, I made my own car as well. I didn't really finish the NURBS model, which was based on the shape of Peugeot 206, however I could use it to test the automated tracking software called Boujou. (We were given the program for evaluation purposes by Leonardo SNS)

The initial tests of the car.

Boujou is developed in Oxford by the company 2d3 and it allows the user to reconstruct the motion of any hand held camera. Using this data it is straightforward to insert any 3D objects in the original footage. We don't have to track points manually like in many other packages, Boujou tracks the features in the images automatically. The software seems to work very well, however we had some trouble eliminating lens distortion.

Original footage:

The feature points tracked by Boujou:

After tracking the material shot by a standard, hand held camera I could insert the car in the footage. Since the model was not detailed enough to be photorealistic, I chose the mini-car concept. To have correct animation I made several scripts which controlled the rotation and orientation of the wheels and the car. I animated only a single locator and the car followed it's path automatically.

While editing the materials of the car the main goal was to integrate it into the original environment. I made several photos using a mirror ball to capture the reflections on the original site. The rendering was decomposed into many layers like shadow, reflection and "plain" passes. The final look - the shadow color, the strength of the reflection etc. - was finished during compositing.

The layers:

The final composition: