Hey,
For my masters final project I’m making an animation, itsd based on top of a hill so to speak. I’ve never done any matte painting and I think it will be benifical to add to my skill list as well as add depth to the background etc.
The image is of the supposed scene so far, I was after some help in how to set up the whole matte really.
Do I do it before or after I render? kind of composite it in afterwards.
The only problem i seem to have is trying to grasp how to make a 360 degree one as the camera will rotate around the character. So rather than set one up every time I wanted to do it in one go then I could just get on with working.
The background image is an example of the look I’m after, obvisouly not a real photo though.
Thanks
Sub
Matte Painting/ Compositing Help
Your best bet in this situation may be to paint the 360 matte painting and then map it onto the inside of a cylinder / sphere in your 3d scene. Still best to do it after you have the rest finished so that you kmow what you need, but just add it into your 3d scene before rendering.
Nick
yeah thats what i’ve done there, I wanted to put them on planes kind of thing to allow for paralax etc. I also wanted to try not to map it to a cylinder because then you lose all z depth in rendering.
is there a specific technique to making these? any tutorials?
Ah ok, so you want to have the land elements involved too. If the hills are close to the camera and require quite a lot of parallax shift then i would suggest doing a regular modelling and UV unwrapping and texturing process. If they are a bit further away then camera projections might be the way to go.
Im not sure of the process for doing a camera projection that has to be 360 degrees, but in theory you could model the hills in low poly, then create 6 cameras each with a 60 degree cone of vision (assembled in a circle) to give you a full 360 degrees coverage. Then, take a snap shot from each of these cameras, and piece the snapshots back together in Photoshop to form your base for the matte painting . Once you have done the matte painting you could split it back into the 6 sections again and reproject these from the respective cameras.
In theory that should give you the coverage you need and mean you can just work on the painting all at once.
There may be a simpler way to achieve a 360 degree projection though, someone like Dave (Everlite) or Jaime (jamesvfx) might be able to offer up a better suggestion.
Nick
I actually did something like this recently, except it was two insects fighting on a rooftop in New York City. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ldAVVu9u9Xw&feature=channel_page at :53-1:23 if desired)
I would suggest the following for your situation:
The easiest way to achieve a 360 mapping is with NURBS geometry. It may be easier to use two separate mattes. Otherwise you could combine the sky and the ground into single image. It depends on how much the camera is going to move. For the sky dome you can find free 360 skies online:
[http://www.cgtextures.com/](http://www.cgtextures.com/) (click on skies 360) or
[http://www.3delyvisions.com/skf1.htm](http://www.3delyvisions.com/skf1.htm)
You'll want to map this onto a half dome. This will allow for freedom of any camera moves that might be needed.
For the ground leading up to the the hilltop, you’ll want to have a surface that gradually slopes down until it is flat. You could continue this down from the skydome with a revolved surface if you want. There are some good panoramas here that might help:
http://web.ukonline.co.uk/mountains/scpan.htm
The transition from the landscape to the hilltop might be tricky. This is the only place where parallax would be evident. You could have a smaller revolved surface with midground elements and an alpha channel. This would create a parallax effect.
You would then have the actual hilltop, which should dropoff to the matte elements somehow. Perhaps, if you were to use one of the panoramas above, you could take it into photoshop, cut the lower, foreground portion out, delete the background. Then do a polar coordinate filter, then fill in the middle with the grass texture and blend the two. In 3d you would have an alpha channel so the edges would create the illusion of a drop-off.
Don’t worry about z-depth for the background. Any effect of depth should be built into the matte painting. Also make sure the dome is fairly large in relation to the character, so you don’t get any scale issues, with any camera moves.
As far as rendering goes, these images could get quite large and may cause memory problems. I would suggest rendering the background as a separate pass to be safe.
I hope that made sense. Below is a quick diagram of this (its just a quarter of the scene obvioulsly it would continue around 360. Also ignore the section of the BG that goes under the hilltop):
360 matte projections… are well… not fun.
in fact all these ‘master environment’ using 1 environment for everything usually doesn’t pan out.
i would suggest plan out ALOT … look at where u need to use mattes and where you dont. Look at u cuts and decide what u can cheat. but if u just must do a big grand 360 matte go for it… but you been warned 
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