http://www.photoshoplady.com/tutorial/matte-painting/257

Howdy all..

Been a hellishly busy several weeks which has been both a blessing and a curse! Good for the cash flow, not so good for oil painting! Been working with SOAP Creative here in Sydney on a James Bond website promotion thingy.. I cant say much more than that and will post more when I can.

I rolled straight into a matte painting job after the Bond gig.. the task.. create New York in 1927! This is big and I had approx two weeks to complete it. It’s taken two and half actually. Matte painting projection was the primary approach, Maya being the 3D tool of choice and of course Photoshop CS2.

Projected matte painting, for those who don’t know of it, is a method of mapping your 2D matte painting onto 3D geometry. For you old school folks, it’s like projecting a 35mm slide of an image onto white blocks of wood in a pitch black room.

Imagine those white blocks of wood are scale models of real buildings and you’re projecting your 35mm slide of the exact same building onto that model (perfectly aligned of course… impossible with a slide projector I know, but stay with me here..)

Now you pick up your handicam and start filming as you walk towards the model and perhaps move around the model a little. Traditional 2D matte paintings have always been limited to.. well, 2 dimensions. You cant go around anything within the painting. You can zoom in, move up and down the painting but the sense of 3 dimensional space is lacking. Same as projecting a 35mm slide onto a screen, you can walk up to it, move it up or down but it will always look 2D.

Projecting that 2D image onto a 3D object allows you to push beyond the 2D realm cheaply and more cost effectively than going full 3D. It only works in some situations and has certain limitations, but if your camera is moving in one direction with perhaps a little drift this way or that, projection is the way to go.

I was taught a fancy trick at Digital Domain by a dude named Eric Hanson.. Use INCANDESCENCE mapping. This has the advantage of A/ Allowing the matte painter to paint the lighting onto the object/scene in a way that only a matte painter can and B/ Doesn’t use a single 3D light within the scene, so rendering time is dramatically reduced. If the lighting needs changing, then it’s back to Photoshop and a re-paint, but the rendering time becomes consistent, predictable and fast.

I will usually render the object flat shaded or with a basic global illumination pass. It will look something like this:

Then I paint it up..

Before I show you the New York shot, here is an example of how I used the technique to great effect on Vincent Ward’s recent Blossom Hill Wine TV commercial, look for the shot of the train going over the viaduct. The viaduct, the train and background were all 2D images projected onto 3D. Yes, even the train!

I’ll leave it there and post a more in depth ‘how to’ soon.. Including the New York shot, so stay tuned!

David Waters

Idaho, US

Site >>> ishbu.com

By the time you get to the 9th in the series of Johnny Weissmuller Tarzan movies, the ideas, in contrast to the leading man’s waistband, are beginning to thin. The isolated escarpment that is home to Tarzan, Jane, Boy and Cheeta doesn’t seem all that isolated – there’s always a plane or a boat arriving, bringing new visitors from civilisation to act as fodder for Tarzan’s prejudice against the outside world (at no point does he acknowledge or reflect upon his own arrival as a baby from a distant land). In this installment, it turns out there’s a nearby race of female warriors, sworn to destroy any man who enters their kingdom. Nobody noticed this massive city of Amazons before, except for Tarzan, who kept it secret from his family.

The plotlines are nothing special, though the arrival of Nazis in Tarzan Triumphs was relatively diverting, with Tarzan revealed as the “perfect isolationist” until he decides to intervene and kick some fascists right in the swastikas. (Incidentally, there are plenty of these rallying cries towards interventionism in Hollywood’s wartime output (Casablanca, anyone?), and I’m wondering how many films plead for the reverse: were there any films made urging Americans not to support the nation’s joining WWII?) To watch the Tarzan films is to observe a gradual depletion of a star’s grace over time: supposedly playing an ageless paragon of physical perfection, Weissmuller is prey to the aging processes that don’t afflict fictional beings, but he is always an engaging and amiable presence. I’ve enjoyed spending time with these characters, but what has regularly impressed me has been the process photography, including some superb composite shots and matte paintings.

I’m not sure who did the special effects on this film, but earlier Tarzan films boasted a credit for Warren Newcombe, a prolific director of photographic effects who also oversaw the amazing matte paintings on The Wizard of Oz. A lot of the time, the Tarzans are plainly shot somewhere out in California, but every now and then there’s a sequence of composites that remind you this is a fantasy world of hyperbolic mountain ranges and deep chasms. The escarpment on which Tarzan has established his family reveals itself to be far more capacious, far less isolated with every movie.

Exterior & Matte Painting

My first hand in Matte Painting and 3d Environment. The only thing in 3d is Building.

Software Used
-Autodesk Maya
-Photoshop
-After Effect

Plants_life

In this image i ised combination of software to make this.

Software used
-3DS Max (Texturing, Displacement Map, Lighting)
-Maya (Modeling, Foilage)
-Photoshop (UVW Textures, post production)

Armagedon

Imagem feita para o curso de quadrinhos de pintura digital dados por mim e pelo meu amigo Emerson na faculdade.

Este es un matte painting que hice de la candente superficie de Venus, donde se pueden ver los restos de una sonda.

This is a matte painting that I did about the hot surface of Venus, where you can see the remains of a space probe.

Referência

Desenho em preto e branco

Pintura final

Bom, esse é mais um dos meus estudos sobre  pintura digital o qual fiz para as aulas de oficina sobre pintura digital da minha faculdade.   Primeiro fiz uma em preto e branco me preocupando apenas com a iluminação e depois coloquei as cores.

My Notes from Matte Painting Tutorial.

Most basic tasks you would undertake as Junior Matte Painter is cleaning, extending, light enhancement and grading.

STEP 1

Let’s say that the action in the movie you are working on is happening in early 1900. Naturaly then, you would want all modern influence to go away; that means banners, wires, cables and cable poles. You would also want to remove any people as actors will be re-composited later.

This first step is usually called Cleaning and from case to case can take from several hours to several days. You would do it using a combination of clone stamp, painting and duplicating elements, as well as importing new reference (if available). As a general advice, when using clone stamp try to sample from distant areas and try to break the similarity between cloned elements.

STEP 2

When cleaning process is done, it’s time to do the actual extension. Usually this involves extending buildings, adding new ones, replacing background and such.

For the purpose of keeping things simple, in this basic tutorial we will only add a background mountain to enhance the look, since the original plate is quite dull. We will also desaturate the base plate as right now it’s too colorfull for the mood we’re going.

STEP 3

We’re starting to get there Now it’s time to enhance the light, which is too uniform, and get rid of that ‘break’ in the water, under the bridge, which, even though it’s natural, doesn’t look good to the eye.

STEP 4

Final step is ussualy optional and depends on the work flow of the team. It’s about grading the image which can either be done now or later via compositing (the most frequent choice).

However, let’s assume the image goes to the compositor and we’re now extracting the final frame as it looks in the film. What we would see now is: a change of color palette, a vignette effect and HDR/bloom/extra light effects.

See Full Tutorial Here

Matte Paiting, es una tecnica donde se combina elementos 3D, fotomontaje de imagenes, pintura digital y mascaras.

La idea de este trabajo es poder mostrar con una camara futurista, algunas imagenes importantes en la historia del mundo, tales como, la estatua de la libertad, el atentado en las torres gemelas y las piramides egipcias.

En breve subiremos el trabajo final

Hey guys,

Since a lot of people are still wondering what a matte painter really does in a studio, I put up an overview of most basic tasks you would undertake as Junior Matte Painter: cleaning, extending, light enhancement and grading.

This article is very simple and intended for the students and guys who want to begin on this path, so everyone else please don’t take offence

I hope that in the future I will be able to put up some more advanced aspects such as cityscape and camera projection

Anyway, here’s the link

http://www.tiberius-viris.com/tut1.html

Let me know if it’s of any use!

I finally had time to do a personal matte and this time I wanted to go for something more illustrative and full of small but many detail.

A continuation of the Legends theme (started with Temple of Nature), Pirate’s Cove illustrates a legendary gulf with a beauty that surpasses any Caribbean island, a place for all Pirates to gather, catch up, drink and reload their supplies.

It’s like their holiday resort

Original size is of 4000 pixels wide and I painted a bit loose at that size (You can see that in the closeups)

I hope you like it!

You can find the full image under my gallery

Of course, prints are available HERE

Massive Black ist ein Design-Schmiede aus San Francisco, die mit ihren Arbeiten schon so manche Filme verschönert haben.

Sie bewegen sich aber nicht nur im Bereich Film, sondern haben sich auch im Game-Design Spezialisiert.

Ich finde die Jungs ziemlich Klasse und Massive Black steht in der Szene auch ziemlich weit oben.

Auch ihre mehr oder minder billigen DVD-Workshops sind Klasse, aber sehr, sehr schnell vergriffen.

Hier ihre Webseite:

http://massiveblack.com/mbNew/frontpage.html

Hier mal die Seite wo ihr die DVD´s ordern könnt:

http://media.massiveblack.com/

Ich habe über die Jungs auch mal ein Video gefunden, wer selbst etwas auf die Suche geht, findet mitunter noch einige mehr.

Howdy All,

Came across a few old photographs of my time at Digital Domain, circa 1996.. In the visual effects world, that’s like dog years, every one of ours is like 160 odd years to us. So 1996 puts these pictures around 150BC in film VFX terms! Which makes these guys… well, its makes them advanced in years!

What they have in mileage does not diminish the spirit, creativity and sense of humor.. (despite Mark’s grave expression in the photo). They also have a credit list under their belts that most fan boys can only dream of!

They were practitioners of a ‘craft’, a way that has sadly been replaced by computer science and the idea that more rendering power will solve the problem. It’s a way of looking at visual problems in a simple practical way and cheating the effect, not simulating the effect. Huge difference here and one that can have huge cost implications. I’m not saying throw away the computers, but how about we start looking at these problems from the perspective of ‘craft’.

As the saying goes, give a man a hammer and every problem looks like a nail. No wonder vfx costs so much today.

The image that ends up on the screen is nothing more than a bunch of 2D shapes, some light, some dark and of varying colours, they are not the ACTUAL thing being depicted. So no matter how much software you throw at a film project, it all boils down to basic composition on a flat 2D surface and of course, story! For this reason I cant wait to see ‘Moon’.

These guys came out of the effects industry where limitation spawned creative visual solutions and in the process, iconic cinema visuals. In this CG age, I feel that the forest is in danger of being lost for the CG trees.. if it hasn’t already.

First old timer.. Ira Gilford. From Detroit if I remember correctly. One of, if not the first guy to design the original HOT WHEELS toy cars! He illustrated a ton of cars for the Fifth Element among other things. I cant quite remember what he was telling Ron here and I don’t really want to speculate either!! You’re a bad bad man Ira!!

“Here.. I’ll draw you a picture of it..” Perhaps Ron’s expression says it all!! Ron Gress, matte painter, mural painter, fine artist in every sense of the word. Worked on Star Trek the Motion Picture and a million things since then. Great guy, great party host and collector of haute couture Hawaiian shirts! If you’re in the US and Reno in particular, go check out his mural at the Reno Hilton (I assume it’s still there.. otherwise see it on his blog)

Ron in his excitement phoning Mark.. “Hey Mark, guess what Ira just told me!”

“.. Stay put.. I’ll grab my duck whistle and be right there!”. Yes folks, Mark ’senior model builder on Blade Runner’ Stetson! You could die a happy man with that credit alone.. That he made time for everyone, has probably forgotten more than most are still trying to learn, is a hell of a nice guy and complete gentleman, goes without saying and barely describes the man. That goes for all them.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, The Fifth Element remains the pinnacle and highlight of my professional film career… and it’s because of these guys. Thanks fellas!