Matte Paintings
 

Hi everyone. Hope all is good with you all. I told myself I would wait till the end of my course and then put everything I'd done into a thread, but its about the mid way point now, so I thought I'd post the two images I have come up with for the course so far. I have learned a heck of alot, and starting this week, we are going outside of photoshop to use after effects and nuke, and some more advanced compositing and hopefully some animation too, will come into play, so in 3 to 4 weeks, with fingers crossed, I might have some moving image versions of at least one of these pictures. I hope you like them. They are not finished so if you spot anything wrong, or have any cool ideas, there's time for me to alter them yet.

The above was for project 1. This next one is my project 2 piece.

Nice painting work ben!

Holy cow ! i love them !

Very nice. The images are a bit too small to spot anything wrong really... but as they are, they look great.

They are both quite lovely, I like the second one more though. And as Mayaniac mentioned, they're kinda small, can't see details very well.

Thanks everyone. I cropped them from PS screengrabs, so I guess theyre about 600 approx pixels wide, down from 4000 ish actual size.

Im kind of glad you mention the second one Genny, the first one was my favourite, I spent alot of time working on the concept and reworking it after having it critiqued alot, but the second one came from a concept I knocked out in about 5 minutes and it didnt take me long to go striaght into the final piece, so I felt a little bit like the first matte was a 'proper' project, whereas the second was a bit more, I dont know, rushed? DO you know what I mean? But I stuck them both in an album on my Facebook page, and that one (the second one) got a couple of comments, so, it seems from everyone Ive shown, that is the preferred one.

Thats also the one Im going to be trying a camera move on. Just going to do a simple 5 second dolly into the picture, but the idea is to have some snow falling too. So its all about to get very complicated for me. We are learning how to do it the 2.5d way, and the 3d way, using after effects and nuke, neither of which Ive used before, not to mention I dont really know how to project textures in Maya or create, render and animate snow. Gonna be a testing last 3 weeks, but Ive got a little bit of time off work which should help a little bit. Thankyou all again for your comments. Will probably be back soon to bug for help on particles!:hug:

Hi Ben
Looking good, the only crit I would have is in the second mat the tree in the middle and in the far distance are to dark against the bright background, light in these areas tend to lap around these objects, I was going to rib you about getting your money back from that course but I think it was money well spent.......dave

dont worry about all that can be done in after effects (cc particle world will become your best friend)
i really use to struggle to create effects in maya and it used to take alot of time creating and rendering effects. but ever since i got into after effects i have become much more efficient
this site will pretty much teach all the basics u need from there only your mind will be the limit of your creativity
videocopilot.net

Thanks Dave. :) Gonna rib me! ha ha.

One of the ongoing learning curves on the course, has been about planning ahead for the compositing stage. There are some things which you do before you leave photoshop, and other things which you can leave and save for the compositing stage, and the sunglare thing is one of them. It was an issue on the castle/lake picture with the foliage in the foreground, and same again here. I put your comment to my tutor, and the compromise is I am going to add a litle now to, kind of, set it in stone, that it is there, and needs looking at, but then, apparently, we will work on it more in After Effects or Nuke or whereever.

Its a technique called lightwrap, apparently there are procedural ways of applying it in compositing

Cheers for the link Murambi. I have no idea what cc particle world is, but I had a quick browse at the link and one of the videos there, and saw a list with lots of cc particle something or others, so perhaps it is one of those?:) CC for me the last 5 weeks has stood for colour correction. Hope it is the same here, know roughly where I am then!¬

Ben, those are stunning! I have to agree with the comments on the darker trees in the distance though.

If I may ask, what course are you doing and where?

Cheers and keep at it!

Jacques

Cheers Halfloaf. Its one of the 8 week workshops that run on CG Society. Go to CG society and click on 'workshops' (funnily enough!) and theres quite a few different ones. Places are quite limited and fill up quick so you have to get in kinda quick I think, its the first one Ive done, but there are some others on there that appeal to me aswell.

The one I am doing is Matte Painting, with David Luong.

Ben

both are very good works for sure. Yeah darker trees in the distance or less saturatedas it will blend them into the 'atmospherics' of the image giving the sense of depth.

If I were to point anything out it would be watch your edges. They are very rough right now. Did you use feathering? I know cutting trees and plant life out can be difficult but it can be done by duping the image andconverting to greyscale, then using levels in PS. Use the black pipette and white pipette to determine the black and white values of the image. this will then in turn create a high contrast of black and white in the image, which will then give you the beginnings of an Alpha channel to cut out your image in the original color image. It does take a bit of tuning to do it properly but it works well. We've been using a similar technique at work

other wise keep at it - looking good

Jay

thanks jay. we've been shown a couple of techniques, one involving finding a suitable channel in the channels menu, and using the levels tool to increase contrast. the other was a way of duplicating the outside edge of the cutouts and screening back over the top at like 5-10% opacity. i havnt described either of them very well i dont think, i will go back over the techniques on the workshop forum which will apparently be left open and online for some time to come. i have to admit i didnt spend as much time trying and experimenting with the techniques as i should, it has been quite a hectic schedule. 'blooming' has also been mentioned by the instructor - made me think of you!

this week it should be about texture projection with nuke/maya. i would say its the week ive been most looking forward to, this week, but then i thought i was in heaven last week when i was reading through the 'preparing layers for export to afx and setting up a 2d camera move', lecture notes, and by wednesday i was climbing the walls with frustration, so i'll keep my mouth shut this week and just see how it goes...