Matching the lighting to our live-action scene

In this section, we are going to set up lighting for our scene. It's important to try to match the lighting in your scene as best as you can with the lighting from the live-action footage to ensure that the shadows of your characters or props match the shadows in the live-action footage to create a realistic composite. Let's get started!

Let's first create a floor plane so that we can try to match the direction of the shadows of our character with the shadows from the live-action footage. We will later also use this plane as a shadow catcher. Follow these next steps:

1. Press Shift + A and select Mesh | Plane to create a new plane object.
2. Scale and move the plane on the x axis and align its edge to the wall of the building. Your scene should now look like this:

Figure 13.13 – Aligning the plane with the side of the building

3. Scale and move the plane object on the y axis...