Dancing Santa help!

[bkumanchik]

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

[agep]

Like this?

dancing_santa.zip

[bkumanchik]

Exactly!, You are the MAN!, Thanks!

 

Now, how did you do it?

 

BK

[agep]

I set the diffuse falloff to 0% on the surface of the ground

[bkumanchik]

Thanks again!