Wow! I just discovered matte painting. How do you create though?

#1

I’ve just recently found out about matte painting due to a featured CGSociety article. I still didn’t have much of an idea of what it was, so Wikipedia helped me find out that it was, basically paintings for backdrops and/or settings of movies.

What it didn’t cover is the creation. I noticed a lot of people have photo realistic stuff, and then even a tutorial started out with an image. So how does matte painting work? Is it photo manipulation to create scenes using real objects as a base, then painting over them to create a desired scene?

Also, do you use stock images? Or does copyright infringement not count when the image is heavily modified to look almost completely different?

#2

Yea you pretty much have it there. Lots of image manipulation and hand painting to create photorealistic results in the context of the film. I say ‘in the context of the film’ because on their own, some matte paintings can look very loose and impressionistic, but appear photoreal in the shots they were created for.
Check out the gnomon workshop matte painting dvds for some more info.

Nick

#3

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