This project was my first introduction to some simple special effects. Nothing too fancy, but still cool for my first attempt. First, I had to make the 3D model. For the dog, I had to trace around a picture of a real dog. The hard part of this was making the legs and the ears have a space in the middle so it wasn't just a block dog. Fortunately, it was supposed to be a wooden toy, so I didn't have to give the sides any depth. The skateboard was actually the easiest part. The only problem I ran into was getting the grip textures to look right with the curvature of the deck.
Next, I put a picture of a real-world hallway behind the dog. It took a few minutes to match the floor of the hallway with the "floor" of the model, but it wasn't really hard. The hard part came with the lights. Because it was an interior scene, I used area lights, which were new to me at the time. It was hard to know where to place the lights because the angle of the shot didn't show a lot of the lights on the ceiling, so I kind of had "trial-and-error" it. However, I think I placed them in fairly accurate places.
