The Outskirts

[everlite]

Howdy :)

It's struggling to work for a number of reasons, over all it seems like you didn't plan your approach very well to begin with. Its an interesting concept and angle and could work but i think you need to scrap it and start again. Sometimes it is better to start with a clean slate than trying to recover something that just aint working.

Starting again you should you should opt for a different approach. split the background and forground, forground been the two main buildings. A little unsure but it seems like you've tried to build these up from textures alone, tut tut. You need to get a good forground plate to start with, in a production you'd never be expected to produce this kind of shot from scratch. I mean, come on, you live in Canada, surely there's lots of cool places like this you can shoot from ?? :) get out and about. Alteratively you can scowl the various ref sites for a similar image.

The second approach, which would allow you to get the desired angle would be 3d, which would be pretty easy for this given the buildings are quite simple.

Then when you get the forground blocked out start work on the background, again photo refs or 3d, you really dont want to paint something like this from scratch :) sooooooo many windows. Just map a few building maps onto various boxes, render, then over paint in PS as required.

Hope you continue, nice concept so far.

Best,
Dave.

[MatejaPetkovic]

Hm...
I also red what everlite wrote and i disagree with some things.
I think you are on right path(it's more interesting to start from scartch and to build something that isnt real-at least for me)
Off course, difficult part will be to put it all together, and to look real, but that is fun, right?
I agree with everlite on buildings in backgound, and if you need i have some excellent refs. :)

Anyway good start and waiting for next upload

M

[Matellis]

Hey guys thanks for the replies!

David: Thanks for all the advise man. The process so far has been tough but very fun. I started out with a concept sketch and then started looking for images that matched enough to call a plate. But I could not find any royalty free images that suited my concept. So in order to stay true to the concept I decided that I should do all the texture work myself. And I am learning tons by doing it. I understand that most matte painters have plates handed to them in production and work off those. But dew to my position ( not being able to find the right plates online and not having access to a car or public transit. I live in a very small town in the middle of nowhere) I had to take the hard road to get this image rolling. Which is fine since I am still learning. Im sure employers wouldnt expect someone to make a scene like this from scratch, but it would be nice to say you could do it.

I am still thinking about doing the background with 3d though. But first I will try to work it out in 2d since there is still much I need to learn about manipulating buildings within photoshop.

Thanks for the input Dave, you always have good advise.

MatejaPetkovic: Thanks for the reply man. I agree, I have always enjoyed making making images from scratch. I learned a lot from the Dylan Cole Gnomon dvds that its always good to start out from a sketch. Which I didnt do for the last matte I started and it bit me in the ass.

I don't have an update yet. Work has been very busy the last day or so. But I just put together all the references that I have used so far so you can see what kind of work I have been doing to this matte. I will get to work on the matte once i finish this post though :D

Cheers! and thanks again guys

http://img507.imageshack.us/img507/5020/warehouserefcompmg3.jpg

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