Truck

This was a little deep dive into realism and light. The goal was to find out how convincing a 3D truck model can look when integrated into a complex photo background. The chassis is a Daimler-Benz semi with an LKW Walter trailer, but that’s just trivia from an old project — the real focus here was all about light, mood, and composition. The background image had rich lighting with purple and blue tones, subtle reflections, and a pretty dramatic atmosphere. I rebuilt that lighting setup inside the 3D scene to match the photo as closely as possible. Then I started composing both ways — adapting the 3D model to the image, and the image to the presence of the 3D model, making sure shadows, reflections, and depth all play nicely together. The result is a little visual trickery that hopefully makes you look twice and wonder if it’s real or not.

One small glitch snuck in though: if you look closely, you’ll notice that the background visible through the truck’s cabin windows isn’t as motion-blurred as the rest of the scene. In later projects, I fixed this by adding an extra step to the render process — an additional layer specifically for areas seen through glass, so they match the overall motion and depth of the scene more accurately.

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