This UFO is one I am proud of. I think of it as a masterpiece. It is not perfect, I still wish I could get it to look more realistic. This scene was created in TrueSpace 4.3. But this UFO was an experiment in learning to create scenes against a background and superimpose 3D models into the background and try to make them look as if they were in the original photograph scene. In this case I wanted to try to see if I could make the UFO cast shadows in the scene against objects shown in the scene. Cararra 3 has a shadow catching feature which saves this kind of work, but I wanted to see if I could make my own shadow catcher in TrueSpace. Here is how I did this. Here I modeled the UFO in TrueSpace 4.3 (my favorite modeler -- I also now have TrueSpace 7.6). It is essentially a lathed object with a hemisphere top and a transparent dome for the glass windows and a few spheres with ambient light turned up high to make them glow. I added the weld seams to give some detail and character to the UFO. That was created using a bump map I created in Illustrator or Paint Shop Pro (I forget which I used.) Basically it is a series of black straight lines. To create the effect of the UFO casting the shadow, I created two versions of the scene. One version is the full color version with the photographic background and the UFO. I placed the UFO into the scene against the background and tried to match up the light in the modeler to match with the light in the photograph. I rendered that image and saved it. Then I created the same scene and modeled stand in objects to approximate the fence and the buildings in the scene. I then painted everything white including the background. Everything in the scene was painted white including the UFO. To eliminate any shading on the UFO (since the UFO is already shaded), I raised the ambient lighting on the UFO. I naturally left the lights where they were as in the original scene and made sure that the lights were allowed to cast shadows. Everything in the whited scene would be white except for the areas in shadow which would be gray. The whited out UFO would still cast a shadow on the approximated fence. I rendered this whited scene and this would be used as a shadow mask. I then opened the scene with the first rendered image (UFO superimposed in the scene) placed in the background and shifted the view to top orthographic view. I then created a plane in the scene and layered it so that it would match the background exactly and then textured the plane with the whited out scene using TS4's masking shaders. All the white areas would be rendered as transparent and darker areas would appear as shadow. Then I rendered the scene, et voila, the UFO appears to be casting shadows onto the fence! The most difficult part of the scene was aligning the camera and the stand in objects so that they would align perfectly with the objects in the background photograph. That took me long hard and frustrating hours to do. But here is the result. Enjoy!