I'm working on a web site for a gentlemen that carves wooden Santa characatures and he wanted an animated Santa that would dance to "Santa Claus is Coming to Town" and I told him "I can use one of your carved santas" (perfect job for A.M.)
So I took a digital picture of one of his carved Santas and mapped it to a grid (billboard) and added a simple skeleton and proceeded to make him groove - including a "bowl-full-of-jelly" laugh just 30 frames and I'm pretty happy with the results (It looks like one of his wooden sculptures dancing!)
My problem is I'm trying to get him rendered on a (pure 255,255,255) white background (without any sort of gradient) and WITH a shadow. I created a ground with a radiused back to eliminate the color variance and played around with the textures on it (the ground) and the lighting but I can't come up with a solution.
Any ideas??, I've included the proj. with all files just render a single frame to see what I mean. Thanks,
Brian Kumanchik
dancing_santa.zip