i could really use a little insight here because i wouldn't know where to begin.

the building seems to float above the background; especially on the left. i am using a background rendered by vue and put it in the background shader node. i tried a few things from the little i know and did some searches but i am drawing a blank.

if someone could give me a clue about what i might try, that would be excellent.

i'm pretty sure that it will bring up some entirely new thing that i've never heard. i am much amazed at all the things people have been able to learn and figure out about poser. hats off to all of you.

Of course, if you're using a background image, then your building IS floating above it. :) Why not render your scene in Vue - import the building and figure and go from there? Everything would be of a piece then. The perspective and shadows would be right, which is the main reason things don't look right here. For Poser 6 and later, where there's no opportunity to render in the landscape application, there's the shadow catcher facility. I can't recall exactly how to do it, but you can render the shadows on your ground without the ground itself. The other thing is to make sure your camera and light settings are the same in both applications, as far as possible.

You'll need a "real" shadow (I'm curently loving the depth mapped ones but raytracing is prolly easier), a "contact" shadow via ambient occlusion. I'd export the ground texture from landscape app, apply it to a square prop underneath your building to catch your shadows and composite the background and "object" images together. There's probably 100 different ways to do it.

It's rather simple, you have to have a light which cast shadows (depthmapped or raytraced, doesn't mather) check the ground shadows in display pulldown menu ( poserdefault) and in the advanced settings of the materialroom check  "shadow_catch_only" of the ground posersurface nodes.

For my image above I used a beautiful background I've found in the sharecg website, I use this one as desktop on my computer.

best regards,

Bopperthijs

 PS. you need to blur the shadow a bit , and yeah I know the light come from the wrong side.

-How can you improve things when you don't make mistakes?

i appreciate the information from each of you. several things have opened up now that i can use to direct my attention to. thanks for taking interest in the plight of a rank beginner.

 

It's all in the shadows.  I did this image recently www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php and was pleasantly surprised how the shadow worked out.  There's still one thing wrong with it that immediately screams fake: the real shadow from the photo on the left that's on the pavement shows a blue cast (from the ambient light from the sky) while mine doesn't.

Get the shadows right, and you can fake a lot.  For instance, in that image the character is rendered directly over the background.  The only "real" things in the scene were the character, one IBL light, and an infinite light to create the shadows.