To start placing the robot in the plate I had, I first exported one frame of the footage, and started to build a camera in Maya that would match the perspective and placed some planes as a reference.
Because we used a tripod to film it, it wasn’t possible to track the footage in Nuke or 3DEqualizer and export the camera to Maya.
Besides the HDRI, I also placed an extra light behind the plane wall so that the robot’s head would have an extra highlight.
When rendering, I separated two different render layers. One for the beauty with no shadows, and another only for the shadows. That way, it’s easier to control the colour in Nuke.
In Nuke, I colour corrected the render, and merger the two render layers. I also added a glow node, to brighten up the light in the robot’s mouth.