A PS site I belong to run by Steve Caplin, who is responsible for all the "How to cheat in Photoshop" manuals, has a Friday challenge whereby he posts various photos as a brief and challenges you on any techniques you wish to achieve what the brief stipulates...and the photo hacking begins.

This week, he posted a photo of a Peter Brotherhood heavy duty machine. I don't participate too often anymore however, I am a sucker for old machines. They represent old school strength, when things were made to last and worked forever. It's a time when I have an excuse to practice my modelling skills...or the lack thereof...lol. I'm a bush mechanic with modelling software and hack and stick until I have something that resembles what I'm after and....my fatal mistake...I texture what I have finished and that's the end of the modeling. After I texture the first item, it gets rendered and a scene develops around it. The last parts of the model are usually placed on a plain as a photo. I create an albedo map, bump, normal and displacement map, for the parts that I never modeled and fashion them on an alpha plain with mentioned texture maps applied, to make it appear as if it is a 3D object.

That's exactly what I did here. I modeled the machine part in the foreground, uvmapped it, textured it and placed it in a scene to see if it could work in an environment. Before I knew it, the environment was set but half the model was missing. The green machinery part suspended by chains. So, it got added in at the end, as a photo...and the chains and shadows were photoshopped in.

I gather everybody knows how to do any alpha plain. If not. Message me and I'll try to explain.