My latest adventure in Design for Motion class: matte painting! Matte painting is not something I would have normally associated with motion media, but it can be a huge part of developing styleframes and storyboards. Typically when one thinks of matte paintings, they think of visual effects and movies. But mattes are used in tv shows and video games too.  Our professor mentioned Dylan Cole as a point of reference. Cole is a matte painter who’s done work for The Lord of the Rings series, Avatar, TRON: Legacy, Halo, Assassin’s Creed… just to name a few.

I almost died doing this assignment. Having put it off over the weekend, I worked around the clock for 48 straight hours to get it done. I really enjoyed it though – I wouldn’t have been able to focus so hard on it if I didn’t like it. My original concept was to depict the netherworld from Aztec creation mythology, but I ended up with a Happyland Pyramid more than a dark jungle with blood sacrifice -___- How did that happen? If this is nothing but an exercise in matte painting and compositing techniques, I’m happy.

Process images below!

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These are pretty much all of the source images (and custom Photoshop brushes) I used in my composite. Matte painting is about relying on high-res photo assets as much as possible, using the paint tools in Photoshop to blend it all together and make it look believable. I spent most of my time on this project painting in textures, shadows and highlights onto the pyramid, resulting in a big transformation.

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Finally, here are some detail close-ups. All of the little plants and such on the pyramid are painted additions.

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