TUTORIALS | Digital matte painting tips

Image Alp Altiner

This matte painting from Alp Altiners forthcoming graphic novel, The Unknown, demonstrates the importance of composition. The viewer is lead into the image and across the bridge

TIPS & TRICKS

Our experts this issue

ALP ALTINER
Award-winning matte painter and VFX Art Director, Alp Altiners credits include Superman Returns and Spider-Man 3 www.alpaltiner.com

Digital matte painting

A dark art or simply a craft to be mastered? Whatever your preconceptions, these tips from ve world-class matte painters should guide you towards the light ...
ost matte paintings begin life as a verbal the most competent colour grading skills in the world, the techniques we cover over the next few pages will never compensate adequately for a lack of artistic ability. Most of all, youll need a good eye, an excellent sense of composition, an aptitude with colours, and a solid understanding of spatial design for the camera. Especially for this feature, ve of the best matte painters from around the world have combined to share their collective experience, offering insights gathered over the course of their many years in the creative industry. From selling concept art to a director to working effectively with layers, well take you stage by stage through the process of creating a matte painting and empower you with expert tips along the way.

DYLAN COLE
Best known for his work on Return of the King, Dylan has just completed Superman Returns as Lead Matte Painter www.dylancolestudio.com

brief communicated by the lms director: A cold and bleak environment, not too alien in its feel or a historically accurate view of the

Southampton Docks, circa 1912. If the brief hasnt already been visualised by the art department, the concept sketch becomes the digital matte painters rst job. Vital as a development tool for exploring the composition of the nal painting, and also as a method of communicating the look to the director, its only when the concept image has been signed off that work should begin on the actual matte painting. Whether the matte painters role is to reconstruct an entire imaginary background from scratch, or to augment a rudimentary set or existing location, the craftsmanship is essentially the same. These days, the majority of digital mattes start with a background plate; reference footage is sourced, then the layered paintwork begins. Colour-picking a brush and painting from scratch is becoming an increasingly rare task, as digital stills form the foundation of the majority of paintings. Yet, by no means does this equate matte painting to a Photoshop collage. Artistic talent is vital, and even with

CHARLES DARBY
One of the pioneers of digital matte painting, Charless credits include Titanic, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Minority Report www.charlesdarby.com

DAVE EARLY
Currently Digital Matte Painting Supervisor at Cinesite, Daves credits include Gladiator and the Harry Potter lms www.cinesite.com

DONT RUSH THE DESIGN PROCESS

If youre involved in designing the matte painting, spend your time wisely and dont rush your work. While the majority of matte painters produce concept art digitally (with Photoshop or Painter), others work in whichever medium is appropriate. Ensure that the colours, composition and lighting are signed off, and that the perspective is accurate before you move to the next stage and begin work on the details.

LUBO HRISTOV
With his own matte painting company, Christov Effects and Design, Lubos credits include The Last Samurai www.christovfx.com

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STEP BY STEP | Working with layers

Images Buena Vista Pictures

When Cinesite created the Planet Factory sequence for The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, David Early knew that the movement through this shot would require a combination of 2.5D and 3D projection. Matte painter Sevendalino Khay created a projected dome backdrop for the distant stars the rst in a series of layers.

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Background layers of planets, including the Vegas planet on the right, required much less detail. But each planet was still handed off as a separate layer to the compositors so that, within Shake, they could be positioned in space to create a sense of parallax within the shot.

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The layers containing the foreground planets were painted with greater resolution, as it was known that these would be used for more than one shot. They would later be projected onto spheres and rendered in 3D through the Shot Camera to enable 3D lighting and real shifts in perspective.

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The Douglas Adams planet on the left was created from a cyberscan made of the author while he was still alive. The detailed matte-painted texture was then applied, and the element was rendered as a 3Dprojected matte painting. The render formed another midground layer for the compositors.

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Within Shake, the compositors then assigned the matte paint layers to cards positioned in Z-space. Each card was assigned a distance, so when the live-action camera move tracked from the background plate was imported, a sense of parallax was created in the distant planets as the camera moved through the shot.

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Once the background was complete, the compositors added the 3D-rendered scaffolding and live-action plate, shot in the studio against bluescreen, as foreground elements in Shake. Various lens effects, glows, atmospherics and colour grading were used to create this nal impressive shot.

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PRESENT ONLY YOUR BEST WORK

Since youll probably be working on several variations of ideas in your concept drawings, use your own judgement when choosing which to present. Although most directors like to have choices when considering how elements of the matte painting will work with the story, never present more than three images or youll inevitably be asked to take elements from each and end up with a composition that doesnt work.

PROJECTING A MATTE PAINTING IN 3D

An alternative technique allows for even greater movement of the camera through a scene. By camera projecting (or camera mapping) a matte painting onto 3D geometry, the scene can be rendered through the shot camera, with the hi-res matte painting adding ne texture detail on top of the 3D geometry. A 3D projected matte provides all the benets of true perspective shifts and real shadows, yet with a lower geometry count because details are provided in the textures.
Using a combination of stills taken from various American cities, careful grading and paintwork, Alp Altiner designed this shot to draw the eye towards the pyramidal buildings on the right

SELL YOUR DESIGN

When presenting your concept work, point out which of your images work well and provide good explanations as to why. Knowing how to sell your work is an essential part of the process. Point out the strengths of the images, and explain how youll address any weaknesses. If youre convinced that one of your images represents the perfect composition, show a couple of alternatives where one element is clearly wrong. Dont fail to underestimate the importance of a psychological sell.

WORK ON A LARGER CANVAS

How often has a guaranteed lock-off ended up being a slight

zoom-in on the matte painting? Expanding your canvas beyond the

CREATING PARALLAX WITH 2.5D PROJECTION

Matte paintings are no longer conned to locked-off shots. Where the matte painting can be projected onto series of planes in the compositing software, and camera data imported to give the impression of slight shifts in perspective via a multi-plane technique. Known as 2.5D projection, this method can also include simple, rendered 3D elements.
Image Alp Altiner

the shot camera rotates nodally around a locked-off position,

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Image Buena Vista Pictures. Courtesy of Dave Early

The live plate for the shot on the left. Since much of it would be hidden by the set, the composition of the matte painting required careful thought

WORK IN 10-BIT COLOURSPACE

Sundown on Magrathea. Like much modern matte work, this shot from The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy involved blending, painting and colour grading multiple digital stills together to create the perfect sunset

standard 2,048x1,556 pixel lm resolution creates a safety margin for any unplanned moves on the shot. Better still, take advantage of the benets of downsampling: double your image resolution (work at 4,096x3,112) and youll enjoy the added advantage of more comfortable paintwork. Rather than needing to ensure your brushstrokes are pixel perfect, youll be able to work with broader strokes, then downsample to 2K when your work is nished.

If your nal output will be lm, work in 10-bit log colourspace wherever you can. 10-bit images maintain the full dynamic range of the original camera negative. While maintaining all of the original data, log images look washed-out to the naked eye, so to view them properly, a lookup table (or LUT) is applied to the monitor. The LUT alters the screen to show the log image as though it were a print. If you dont have access to lookup tables, working in 10-bit linear is a good alternative, and while the full dynamic range of the negative isnt present, unless youre making radical colour grades to the scan, youll rarely see the difference. 8-bit linear is the standard for television work, including HDTV.

DEGRAIN THE FILM SCAN

If, as is nearly always the case, a plate is the basis of your matte painting, before starting any paintwork, youll need to remove grain. Kodaks Digital Gem Professional 2 plug-in (www.kodak.com) works well in eliminating lm grain from scans, and also noise from digital photographs. For a locked-off plate, an alternative is to have a compositor create a grain-averaged plate from 12 consecutive frames of the shot.

BRUSH UP YOUR ART SKILLS

Even with the best knowledge of Photoshop in the world, you wont be a great matte painter without a fair degree of natural artistry. Youll need to understand perspective like an expert. If youre still unsure about constructing multiple vanishing points,
Image courtesy of Charles Darby

nows the time to pick up any of the numerous books on the subject and hone those skills.

LEARN TO LOVE THE CLONING STAMP

It may sound straightforward, but learning how to clone well is an important trick of the trade. Good cloning is invisible cloning. Practice removing a tree from a digital image of a landscape, or a lamppost from the front of a brick building.

Good matte painting fools the brain into believing a at image is a truly three-dimensional world. Virtually all of the background for this shot from The Fifth Element is a 2D matte paint

STEP BY STEP | Projecting a matte painting in 3D

To achieve a photorealistic crane-up on the ancient African city of Carthage, Lubo Hristovs team decided to project a matte paint on a relatively simple 3D model. Once the camera move was nalised, the Projection Camera was set up. Since the city was seen at its widest at the last frame of the shot, the Shot Camera was duplicated at this frame, locked off and renamed as the Projection Camera.

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Once the 3D geometry had been created, a grid texture was projected from the Projection Camera, and the scene rendered through the Shot Camera. Areas showing excessive texture stretching, or those obscured from the view of the Projection Camera, were identied as requiring separate texturing, as revealed in this render of the rst frame of the shot.

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Back in mental ray, three orthogonal, primary coloured distant lights were rendered through the Projection Camera. The resulting render was used as a selection matte in Photoshop to variously isolate the ground, rooftops, side walls and front-facing walls. In the image above, each is shown as a separate colour. This was an essential step for the next part of the process.

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Image Buena Vista Pictures

Digital matte painting tips | TUTORIALS

Image courtesy of Charles Darby

colour-correcting a reference image until it breaks, rely on your artistic skills and, where required, paint areas from scratch.

3D KNOWLEDGE IS ALWAYS HELPFUL

Though its certainly no prerequisite for the job, 3D knowledge is often benecial. Whether its in setting up your own 3D camera projections, or using 3D models to help with perspective, so much the better if you can produce the elements yourself. If launching headrst into Maya seems overwhelming, try your hand at one of the more self-contained modelling and rendering packages such as Cinema 4D (www.maxon.net).

Because this shot from Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire required a zoom into the lit window, the matte painting was an enormous 20K

YOU CANT COLLECT TOO MUCH REFERENCE DATA

Most matte painters build up their own reference libraries of images by shooting digital stills wherever they can. Keep a digital camera with you and jump at opportunities to go out on location. Shoot all the stills you think youll need, including general views, textures and lighting conditions. Capturing images in RAW format retains the most data, and bracketing images around a central exposure will provide more information about the highlights and shadow areas. Where shots require signicant colour grading, shooting HDR images generally considered overkill. may be worthwhile, but unless youre really pushing a grade, its

USE LAYERS SENSIBLY

Be structured, label all of your layers clearly and sort them into folders. When youre up against a deadline and trying to tweak the roof tiles on the fteenth building from the right, youll appreciate a good working method. Work like a painter from background
In the nal digital painting, the tones, composition and perspective are faithful to the original concept art (below left): proof that digital techniques do not render traditional media entirely obsolete

to foreground. Start with the sky, then move on to the clouds,

Image courtesy of Charles Darby Image courtesy of Charles Darby

DONT FORCE PHOTOGRAPHS TO FIT

While photographic images are often the best starting points for a digital matte painting, dont force the wrong photographs to t. A good matte painting isnt simply a collage of photographs bound together with a few painted pixels. Rather than stretching and

For Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Charles Darby presented this single A4 watercolour to demonstrate how his nal matte painting would look

A stone procedural shader was applied to the 3D model and rendered through the Projection Camera. The process was repeated with about 20 other brick, stone and tile textures and procedural shaders to create a series of layers. By using the selection matte, appropriate areas within each of these images were combined to form the basis of the matte painting.

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With the texture layers combined as overlay layers in Photoshop, paintwork began. Since the lighting would be rendered in 3D in order to achieve greater realism through real shifts in perspective, a 3D ambient and shadow lighting pass, rendered through the Projection Camera, was added as an overlay layer to preview the effect of the rendered lighting.

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The nal matte painting was projected back through the Projection Camera, and the shot rendered through the Shot Camera, with mental ray lighting. Renders were graded in Shake and additional 3D elements were added, including the ocean, animated boats and people. The trees were textures projected onto cards and then rendered in 3D.

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Images Dylan Cole Image Dylan Cole

Initial: as comparison of this sketch and the nal matte painting (reproduced below) shows, all of the important creative decisions should be made in the concept work

Final: the composition, colour tones and feel of the lighting are almost identical to the concept created in Photoshop. Only the foreground building on the left is true 3D

With the saucer building as the only 3D element in this shot, the landscape was created via a combination of photographic reference images and paintwork

From another of Dylan Coles personal projects, this desert town sketch demonstrates just how closely the concept lighting matches the nal matte painting Created from a combination of photographic reference stills and Photoshop paintwork, the blimps were the only elements in this shot derived from basic Cinema 4D models

mountains, background atmosphere and subsequent layers of buildings. You may end up with about 50-100 layers, grouped into about 10 folders for easy colour grading.

KEEP YOUR ELEMENTS LIVE

Never atten or merge a layer unless youre sure youll never need to tweak that element in isolation. Changes may be requested until the moment before delivery. If youre unable to shift a background element to make way for the new positioning of the CG, youre in for a lot of unnecessary paint xes that could have been avoided by keeping more elements live.

CHECKLIST | 15 steps to success

1. Familiarise yourself with the shot. Is it going to be straightforward matte paint, or will it require a 2.5D projection or full 3D projection? 2. Create two or three concept images and get approval on one of them from the Director or VFX Supervisor. 3. Check that your monitor has been correctly calibrated for colour and contrast. 4. Collate all the images youll need. These will include background plates, 3D renders and reference stills. 5. Shoot any additional stills that might be useful. 6. If youre working on a 3D-projected matte painting, ask the modelling department to hardware-render a wireframe from the Projection Camera. 7. Check whether the compositors have any specic requirements for you. 8. Import your personal settings into Photoshop, including shortcuts and custom brushes. 9. Decide whether youll paint at 2K, or a higher resolution then downsample. Set up your Photoshop canvas slightly larger than the nal image. 10. Import the concept drawing (and/or any hardwarerendered wireframes) as a background layer. 11. Switch to log colourspace and run a log-to-linear LUT on your monitor. 12. Import your images into Photoshop and organise your layers with care. 13. Now paint to your hearts content, using reference images where you can.
Images Dylan Cole

WORK WITH THE COMPOSITOR

Discuss with the compositor which layers they would like to work with, and whether they have any special requirements, particularly if theyre blending the matte painting with live-action elements. Layers that are typically required include atmosphere, highlights, shadows and various mattes. Elements that need to be animated should be created on their own separate layer, and elements which may become foreground to live-action should also be split off into a new layer.

14. When the work is complete, get sign-off on your nal image by the Visual Effects Supervisor. 15. Lastly, save out the layers discussed with the compositor, following the studios naming conventions.
List courtesy of Alp Altiner

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