Welcome back to our monthly Digital Matte Painting challenges, presented by CGSociety! These short monthly challenges will give you a chance to hone in your skills or learn new ones. We are providing a different theme each month, with a professional brief, as well as guidelines. Each installment will be judged by David Luong, Milan Schere and one guest judge specifically invited based on the theme.
All skill levels of artists are welcome in this challenge! Please, respect this if you decide to participate.
The prizes for top 3 placements are:
1st Prize:
- Allison Road T-Shirt (if campaign is successful)
- Allison Road game for console (xBox or PS4)
- A spot in CGWorkshop of choice
- A coupon code for a free year of Autodesk SketchBook Pro
- One Krita USB stick bundle
- A free digital subscription for 1 year (13 issues) of 3D World
2nd Prize:
- Allison Road poster (if campaign is successful)
- Allison Road game for PC or Mac
- A coupon code for a free year of Autodesk SketchBook Pro
- Krita Muses digital download
- One year subscription to Advanced Photoshop magazine
3rd Prize:
- Allison Road eBook Making Of
- A coupon code for a free year of Autodesk SketchBook Pro
- Secrets of Krita digital download
- An ArtRage Lite licence
There are no runner-up prizes but 3D World offers everyone who enters a final submission one free digital issue of their magazine. No strings attached.
Allison Road - Considered the spiritual successor of P.T., the playable teaser for the cancelled video game Silent Hills, Allison Road is an upcoming first-person survival horror video game created by Christian Kesler: www.facebook.com/AllisonRoadGame
Advanced Photoshop Magazine - Published by Imagine Publishing, Advanced Photoshop is the essential resource for creative professionals wanting to master high-end, commercial Photoshop skills. Focusing on cutting-edge trends and created by industry professionals, this trusted brand delivers world-leading step-by-step techniques in matte and digital painting: www.advancedphotoshop.co.uk
Autodesk SketchBook Pro - Developed by Autodesk, SketchBook® Pro helps digital artists design with professional-grade perspective tools and an intuitive user interface. The program supports layers with import and export of Photoshop format. Other features include rulers, symmetry, the ability to customize brushes, create texture brushes, and rotate the canvas: www.autodesk.com/products/sketchbook-pro
Krita - The only real painting application for Linux, Krita is also available for Mac and Windows. The Software has been developed with Matte Painting, Concept Art, Texturing and Comic Book Illustration in mind: www.krita.org
3D World Magazine - The planet’s best-selling magazine for CG artists, covering the fields of animation, VFX, games and arch-viz. Every month, you’ll enjoy brand-new tutorials written by some of the leading creators in CG, providing practical guides to help you create amazing artwork or animation and explaining essential techniques to help you develop your 3D skills: www.creativebloq.com/3d-world-magazine
Ambient Design ArtRage Lite - A realistic painting program for Windows & Mac OSX, part of the range of ArtRage painting apps from Ambient Design. ArtRage offers something different to the standard digital art program: a bit messier, a bit more room for inspiration, and extremely flexible. No other program offers the gorgeous textures, easy colour mixing and creative freedom that ArtRage does: www.artrage.com/artrage-lite
Delivery of the prizes is the responsibility of the sponsors, not CGSociety.
Required in every monthly challenge to qualify for the prizes:
- Two work in progress images in the forum for critique and feedback.
- Your final image must be delivered before 11:59pm PST on the last day of the month of the challenge.
To enter, simply create a new thread in this forum with the DATE of challenge and name such as: “October 2015 - Christian Kesler”
For this month of October, the theme is “Allison Road” and the brief as follows:
While Allison Road is predominantly set in a British Townhouse, there are other environments to explore. In this mixture of dream and nightmare you will uncover dark secrets that take the story way beyond the realms of reality. One of your journeys will lead you to Magga. A location lost in space and forgotten by time, the weight of its isolation distorts your every thought. Are you prepared to climb down the ladder and step into the unknown?
Your objective is to design a location at the bottom of the ladder, neither urban, nor tied to reality. Think surreal, Dali-esque landscapes, organic in nature and desolate in appearance. What is down there? Are there trees? Rocks? Is there any life at all, or is it a barren wasteland? Let your imagination flow freely, but remember it needs to fit the style and vibe of Allison Road.
Objective: To create a full HD 1920x1080p digital matte painting production style frame . This can include still frames of animated objects such as water, vehicles, atmospherics, particles, but this is to be a finished still frame image which can function as visual communication between various departments, artists, as well as presented to the client or supervisor.
Each month we feature a professional guest judge from the industry in order to assist us in judging these monthly mini DMP challenges. For the month of October 2015, please welcome Christian Kesler!!
Christian Kesler is an experienced Concept Artist, Environment Artist and Matte Painter predominantly working in the movie industry. Having started his career at Double Negative in London, he then moved on to work at studios like Industrial Light&Magic and Weta Digital on movies such as The Hobbit, The Avengers, The Guardians of the Galaxy and Avatar. In 2014 he decided to follow a life-long passion and started to work on a horror game titled Allison Road.
Fast forward one year and a group of 10 highly passionate game enthusiasts is developing Allison Road full-time to make it a unique, bone-chilling horror experience for PC, XboxOne and PS4. The project is currently seeking public funding via Kickstarter: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/allisonroad/allison-road-first-person-next-gen-survival-horror
Please, feel free to check out more of Chris’ work at: www.chrike.de
Well be judging on creativity and execution in this challenge. Good luck to everyone! Please feel free to ask any questions here.
As always, you can ask general digital matte painting questions, and post WIP work not pertaining to this challenge in the regular DMP forum here: http://forums.cgsociety.org/forumdisplay.php?f=196
. Big thanks to Milan, David, Chris, and CGSociety, you guys are awesome! 
