Hi, this my latest attempt at matte painting in a very long time. Real life has a way of getting in the way, lol.
Anyway, this piece was inspired by a screen shot i took while playing Age of Conan. Fire away, all crits welcome. I had a hell of a time figuring out the shadows and I’m sure they’re still wrong. I am struggling with the shadows… can’t seem to get them right.
Are you aiming for a photo-realistic look, for use as a background plate? It looks very nice, and the texturing is very good. I cant comment on the lighting/shadows, as i dont have much experience with lighting.
hi, well I think that for photoreal attempt it still needs lots of work to do, first of all always work with photo reference, what mood are you trying to achieve? what colors what exposure etc,
in your image I can see each photo element you used has it’s own exposure and black/white levels, that’s something you have to work on in order to integrate everything together in one piece, the shadows are wrong is like you have 2 different sun directions , I only see shadows/light contrast on the towers you need that in all image, everything looks kinda flat , match your rocks colors, they’re supposed to be the same kind of rock and some look more saturated in red and other more desaturated and yelowish,
I’m not sure about the perspective either , hope this helps
thanks guys… yes, going for the photo-real look.
As usual, excellent points, James. thanks. Gonna take them 1 at a time and see what I can do. I plan on replacing that mountain in the back to match the foreground rocks and try re-lighting everything to match. In this ver, I was going for the light coming from the left parallel to the wall. I’m thinking of changing it to coming from the front with the viewer perspective coming from the foreground shadows.
I had some free time this weekend to update this piece. I think I learned a lot. I adjusted the lighting, created a new mountain in the background to match the rest of the rock and added a road. Some feedback would be greatly appreciated.
the shadow angle in your towers are wrong, they have to match, and you are not projecting any sun light / shadow from the sun to the ground , you need aerial perspective as well
Everyone is giving you good pointers. If I may say something that I think might help you a bit: Ok I would also color correct the color of the walls. It seems to me that the stone that a castle would be built with would have been taken from around the same area, so a little more color shift towards your sand/rocky ground would help the overall look. look at valley of the kings reference for color balance. Just a suggestion. 
Yes, Marcin, you are absolutely correct. I was thinking the same thing. This was inspired from a screen-shot from “The Age of Conan” game. the original screen-shot had an over-all reddish color to it… including the walls. Over time I put together this castle wall from bits of other photo references and i liked it better then my original castle. I will post up the original Photoshop drawn castle later today. I guess I have to change one or the other, although I like the rock and foliage to the right. Thanks for the input.
As suggested on another site, I worked on the tower/wall 3 pt perspective. I drew in some guide lines and adjusted the far tower to “kind of” match the first tower. What i have here is basically eyeballed. When i adjusted to fit the guide lines exactly it seemed too extreme and didn’t look right to me, so i pulled back some. Maybe the towers are too close or something but it just looked off. I did a little researching and came up with these sites in case someone else needs some help in this area as I did(do).
http://conceptart.org/forums/showthread.php?t=108180
http://media.wiley.com/product_data/excerpt/43/04714727/0471472743.pdf
http://www.handprint.com/HP/WCL/perspect4.html
I also paid “a little” attention to relighting the right side foreground elements and I readjusted the look of the sky to help it fit the overall image more. I know there areas need more work but I wanted to concentrate on the perspective issue.
It seems that in beginning to address the 3rd point, you have unintentionally affected the rest of the perspective. Notice how the second tower has suddenly become fatter, and almost the same width as the original tower, when it should be thinner as it was in the pervious post. Working with perspective can be a bitch… lots of fine adjustments to get all the points working in harmony, but you are certainly moving forward.
In terms of scale, I think that the distant trees (particularly the one that is stood on its own) are too large. In the image, the tree is about 2/3rds the height of the catle wall, but we imagine it is a long distance back. If we brough that tree forward it would be much bigger than the castle wall (hypothetically), thus making it not a particularly grand castle. If you get some better distant elements in there with more refined aerial perspective i think it will enhance this a lot.
Keep at it, its come a long way!
Nick
Thanks again, Nick.
Yeah, believe it or not I caught the fatness of the second tower late last night. About 3 am EST, lol. I think I spend to much time looking at the piece I’m working on and need to stop now and then to keep fresh eye, so to speak.
Thanks for pointing out the background elements. That’s something i missed all together. Ok, so, back to work. I’ve learned a lot working on this piece that I want to go back and fix some of my older stuff that suffers from the same mistakes. Funny how when i did them I thought they were pretty good… you know, for a beginner, but now I’m kind of embarrassed by them, lol.
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