Basic mattepainting exercise final scene here LINK
I will do a basic rundown on how I have achieved this so far. Yes there are glaring mistakes but thats how I learn.
Rich
Matte II from the beginning
everlite
#2
ok … ok … ok … right … thats good but, BUT!!! … you JUMPED AHEAD! 
So take a few steps back. What i’m trying to do here is help you step by step, and we cant do that if you start the race at the finish line 
So, begin with the plate, take a screen grab so everyone can see, and credit the original source with a link. Then discuss your ideas first, discuss the plate and how best to use it, which areas provide points of interest in leading the shot etc… get feedback on your ideas, source various references that you feel will work, maybe think about elements that cross into the foreground, perhaps these could be 3D. So be patient and wait for people to help you key point here; take your time 
In fact, don’t touch the plate for a few days!! haha
Best,
Dave.
Had a day off and too much coffee, yea I did jump ahead a bit, well alot. Well all the way,
I dont know what happened, one minute I was gawping at a blank plate scratching my head. The next it was kind of done. I did stop for The jeremy Kyle show and counting the quote “at the end of the day” 36 today.
I have been a little bit naughty, well when I have sorted out my hosting site I will show what and where I went.
Many thanks Dave,
Rich
:wip:
Dave gave me a link to a live action plate. The live action plate is available from VIDEOCOPILOT Andrew Kramer there is a really good CG artist and has over forty tutorials on the use of after effects. He has two tutorial sets the foundation level where the live action plate is from is on the after effects basic tutorials. ( I watch these and refer to them all the time) and the more advanced tutorials.
Basic plate converted
The rule from Dave was no alien invasions, Volcanos (yea dont talk to me about volcanoes) no rundown city, just a basic simple matte. Uhmm.
Watching the local news program ident and the idea hit me, on the ident is a shot of felixstowe container port. Yay I was happy loads of colours and shapes it will give the the actors (Sam and Tino) something to walk to.
I generated a thumbnail which I will keep to myself as it was drawn on the back of a bank statement. I wanted containers, a fuel area, cranes and shipping. Now I matched up some photos to the thumbnails seen below. It looks like a bad collage but it was set up deliberatly to have receding scale. The jpg does not show it well but a horizon line was drawn across. Now there were areas of concern, perspective and some issues such as lighting and grain matching.
Grain matching down below using noise filter, that was a headache, 2nd cup of coffee I had a match.
Chain link fence awesome, well it was not easy, found the fence in my texture library, it pays to have a library of clouds, textures sometime though I refer to CGTextures.com awesome free resource of textures. I had to tile the texture after some swearing I managed to make it match. Now how do I incorporate it into the matte. Alp Alptiner taught me a trick which I used here. The image has a white background that needs removing. Time to go into channels, find the darkest channel, duplicate it, levels and adjust it so it goes black and white. Using the magic wand tool select the black and save selection as. Delete the duplicated channel. Control Shift I to invert the selection and delete a layer with a alpha channel, Drag and drop the fence in.
The finished plate, not neat on the edges but that will be cut out with a garbage matte in After Effects.
Now this matte is not finished, I thought it was but Dave and I would like to get you guys involved and make this better. I made a mistake by rushing through it. Now its going to be Redux time and make this awesome.
Rich
Loads more to come. :wavey:
everlite
#5
Ok, David didn’t give any rules, if you want aliens, feel free
So scrap the current one, its not working for various reason, lighting, points of interest, perspective etc … start fresh and think about ideas, think about the plate and how best to use it … how best to take advantage of the areas without going in and roto’ing the whole thing … just think about different ideas for the moment.
Dave.
eyecon
#6
Hi,
yeah I have to agree, why dont you sketch a few ideas first? Doing doodles might not be fast but it will oepn possibilities and layout your composition early on. That way you will have an idea what specific images too look for.
Another thing would be identifying the light sources early on. What time of day is it? Is it cloudy? Sunny? Where is you light source? Those kind of things that sometimes breaks or makes your matte realistic.
Cheers Eric, will be doing that about…now. Time to do some sketching.
Rich :arteest:
Matt Scheurman aka Mordecai sent me this link, he said scroll down to the matte paintings. Youve been linked !
True enough my Natural History Museum video that I created in photoshop CS3 was there, I posted in on youtube and forgot about it. Looking back on it I can see how disorganised I was. I cringe at some of it. But it was a buzz seeing it there.
I am now working even harder
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2008/03/28/adobe-photoshop-video-tutorials-best-of/
Back to the wacom
Rich :bounce:
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