Hi,
I’ve just finished the Matte Painting workshop run by David Luong.
It’s been a fantastic experience over the past 8 weeks and I feel like I’ve leant loads. I wasn’t sure if I should do the course at first as I didn’t know how the online experience would work. Any doubts that I had evaporated within the first few lessons and it was great to the end.
David was a great instructor, he managed to post a huge amount of feedback on everyone’s work and the video classes were great. I completed two Matte’s over the 8 weeks with the projection mapping stuff happening on the second piece.
The first was a cityscape and think a little over ambitious, I’m pleased with aspects of it, but it falls down in the photo-real sense so I’m going to carry on working on it to push it further. The main thing I learnt doing this was using the adjustment layers clipped onto chosen layers below (you can imagine why I didn’t find them so useful before when they changed all the layers!) and noise reduction in the colour channels. I also found the overlay layer mode to be really useful for putting in texture on the 3D objects I added.
The second was a landscape based on Wales - if you haven’t been there its well worth a visit, really amazing place, loads of castles! For this one we had to put a camera move in so I learnt a lot about Nuke. The final shot is a projection map from Maya as the PLE edition of Nuke won’t give me the output. I enjoyed doing this one a lot more - not sure why, less fiddly I think.
I’m going to continue practising - my plan is to do a painting from the jungle concept thats in amongst some of the work below.
Lastly, if anyone thinks I’m plugging the course…I am!! 
It was well worth doing. I know a lot of the guys on this forum are already working in the industry, but for those who want to learn more or for people like myself who are just starting as Matte painters then it’s great.
Hope you like the work, any thoughts ore critiques would be greatly appreciated.
Some concepts first…
and the matte’s that I developed from them:
