Placing 2D Cutout Viz-People In Your Renders – The OldSchool Method

Place 2D Cut-Out People in Photoshop

The main challenge compositing photographed cut-out people in your renders is getting the proportions and perspective right. In this tutorial I’ll demonstrate the tried and tested method for adding people into your scene without facing these issues.

So in this example Future City scene, I’ve placed a bunch 3D people around the entire space. Any kind of 3D people will be sufficient for this task. We’ll just be using them as a reference in our final composition. We can use the RenderMask plug-in to render out a mask consisting of just our 3D crowd. Make sure you hide the glass elements, otherwise the models behind them won’t be visible in the mask.

Import this mask into Photoshop, place it in between the vegetation layers and the background. Chose the ‘Screen’ blending mode to remove the black portion but retain everything else. This will give you the right indication for setting a proper scale for a 2D person.