I have now shot plates for the first project.

I used the cube in the third image to align the camera in Maya. I took extra care to write down the focal length, 35 mm, when shooting to make this process easier.

After setting up the camera, I put in a placeholder sphere and set up the render layers to render the beauty and shadow separately.

I had to stitch the shadow plate together because I wasn’t able to block the sunlight over the entire area of the shot at once. I’ll be cleaning it up as necessary as I continue with the project. I got the difference between the shadow plate and the clean plate to start creating the matte for the shadow cast by the fence. I will also be cleaning this up later. Projecting this matte from the light source onto the sphere gets the matte for the light on the sphere.

In Nuke, the ball’s shadow matte is used on the shadow plate to avoid double shadows. The projected fence shadow matte on the ball is used as a mask for the diffuse direct and specular direct AOVs to get the fence shadow on the sphere.