| Digital Art 101 - Matte Paintings |
| Monday, 07 May 2007 | |
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Here is a quick rundown on how most digital artists create matte paintings. In a recent project I've been working on, I needed a background for the DVD menu. It needed to be 3 screens wide (2160x480) so that when you browse through the DVD options it will zoom you to the left or right. The problem is, it needed to be a desert-ish scene, and it had to have certain elements. The description of the image was clear. It had to have:
Since the description was very strict on what each screen had to have, I had no other choice than to create the image by hand. So, here is what I did. I went online and did a basic search through google images for "sand dune", "desert", "desert mountains", "sand tracks", and "desert sky". Once I had the individual images with the items I needed, I used basic matte painting techniques and combined elements from all 4 images (the sky image is not shown below) into one larger image, color corrected them, and then did a little freehand painting to blend them together.  I took the dunes and plants from the right, the dune from the center, and the mountains and track from the right, put them together, replaced the sky entirely, and the result is this:  This is how most matte paintings are done. The artist gets reference images together, adds them into a new scene, and then paints finer detail into them. If this was for a motion scene, the sky would be animated, as well as cloud shadows on the ground, and maybe a little wind in the plant leaves, and dust along the ground. Most matte shots start with the motion plate (for instance, if we had footage of a jeep driving down those tracks) and then the other elements are added to complete the scene. And with that, the image is complete. We have all the elements we need in one single shot. Comments (0)
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