I have worked together with Stefano Tabacco.
Year: 2005
My contribution: lighting and compositing (I also worked with Stefano on modeling and texturing)
We realized this project in India, where we were working.
The kart was found in Goa.
Textures were collected mostly near Bangalore, we also went to a timber depot to get most of the textures references. Texturing was a big part of our work since we thought that they would have been the key for a realistic outlook for our image. We took many photographic references, woods metals and sand mostly. Textures have then been converted into Mental Ray .map format to achieve a better memory performance when rendering. Also an important part of our work was to create an HDRI environment map of our location. So we shot a probe at many different exposures and got a very dynamic image. We rendered the image in Mental Ray 3.3: features like anti-alias per object, approximation editors and so on were necessary to help us render the image in a short amount of time.
We split the image in several rendering passes, so that we could use compositing to help us match the CG elements with the background picture. We decided to place the kart under the big Banjan Tree, about 20 km from Bangalore.