Matte painting is one of the oldest techniques in the visual effects industry and one of the most widely applied techniques as well. The concept of matte painting is simple: “Use one or few paintings to replace a background.” Although the concept is so simple, but the technique of matte painting is quite skillful and artistically demanding because the paintings used to replace background have to be realistic enough and support the film style so the audiences can think it’s a real background.
Krita is a professional FREE and open source painting program. It is made by artists that want to see affordable art tools for everyone. Texture and matte painters; illustrations and comics; GET KRITA NOW. #1 Best free painting software in 2019. A matte painting is a painted representation of a landscape, set, or distant location that allows filmmakers to create the illusion of an environment that would otherwise be too expensive or impossible to build or visit.(source). Ages ago, extremely talented artists painted these realistic scenes on large sheets of glass. With the invention of Adobe Photoshop, things began to change. A free and open-source drawing software, Krita’s entire purpose is to offer affordable drawing tool to all. It offers tools for concept art, for painters into texture and matte painting, and for comics and illustrations. Features: It offers a clean and responsive user interface that allows you to move and customize the dockers and panels.
Matte painting background This is one the most common vfx shots in film making. You shoot your actors in front of green or blue screen, then apply a single painting to the background. With this technique, you can make your film look like it was filmed anywhere around the world, even if the world doesn’t exist. | |
A 2D matte painting replacing the blue screen | |
The challenge of matte painting is when the camera is moving it’s position. After all, it’s just a flat 2D painting. If it’s a locked off shot then it’s easy to just put the painting in the background with the right amount of focus blur and it’ll look real. But when the camera starts moving, it will reveal that the environment is just a flat 2D painting. Even before vfx turned digital, there was a way to solve this problem. The artist (matte painter) will paint on layered glasses. The foreground of the painting will go on the glass that is in the front, the background will go on the glass in the back. This will provide parallax when the camera starts to move, making it feel 3D. Of course you still can’t rotate or move the camera too much. But for most shots that need environments, this is enough. | |
matte painting on layered glasses. Image from: http://www.digitalmattepaintinghandbook.com | shooting with matte painting on glass. Image from http://forum.cfsl.net/ |
Matte painting Environment As VFX moved into the digital age, the abilities of matte painting expanded. With 3D programs’ help, the camera movement can be more free. You can animate the camera flying through paintings in 3D software to create a helicopter fly-over shot with less trouble and cost. Instead of painting on glass, we can apply a technique called “camera projection” or “3D projection”. This technique allows artists to put their paintings in 3D software and create simple 3D geometry to match the shape of the environment. You can create as many 3D objects with paintings as you want and position them any place or position as you need to create the right parallax. Layered matte painting in 3D software. Image from: http://conceptartandmattepainting.blogspot.de/ Buy excel for macbook pro. What’s the different between using a matte painting in 3D software than just building a full 3D scene for your environment? Well, think about a realistic looking environment for a moment. There are thousands and millions of details. There might be a thousands of leafs just on one tree positioned in different ways and receiving light in different ways, imagine how many are needed for an entire tree covered mountain. Every window on a building all have a lot of different faces and they all receive light causing shadows in a different way. If you try to build these in 3D software, you will have to make all those details and light them well in order to look realistic. Of course the 3D software nowadays has a lot of functions that can help you achieve this easier. But it still takes a lot more work than a matte painter who manipulates photos in Photoshop to get the same details. It’s easier to control and fine tune the look, no endless render time, and you need only one matte painter rather than modelers, texture artists, lighting artists and render artists. This means faster, cheaper, and a better look for your film. Here are some video examples of applying matte painting to make digital environments. . For more examples please visit LightRay FX |
- For the technique used in photography and special effects filmmaking to combine two or more image elements into a single, final image, see Matte (filmmaking).
The government warehouse in Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) was painted on glass by Michael Pangrazio at Industrial Light & Magic, and combined with live-action footage of a government worker, pushing his cargo up the center aisle.
A matte painting How can i backup my macbook air. is a painted representation of a landscape, set, or distant location that allows filmmakers to create the illusion of an environment that is not present at the filming location. Historically, matte painters and film technicians have used various techniques to combine a matte-painted image with live-action footage (compositing). At its best, depending on the skill levels of the artists and technicians, the effect is 'seamless' and creates environments that would otherwise be impossible or expensive to film. In the scenes the painting part is static and movements are integrated on it.
Background[edit]
Digital Matte Painting
Traditionally, matte paintings were made by artists using paints or pastels on large sheets of glass for integrating with the live-action footage.[1] The first known matte painting shot was made in 1907 by Norman Dawn(ASC), who improvised the crumbling California Missions by painting them on glass for the movie Missions of California.[2] Notable traditional matte-painting shots include Dorothy's approach to the Emerald City in The Wizard of Oz, Charles Foster Kane's Xanadu in Citizen Kane, and the seemingly bottomless tractor-beam set of Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope. The first Star Warsdocumentary ever made (The Making of Star Wars, directed by Robert Guenette in 1977 for television) mentioned the technique used for the tractor beam scene as being a glass painting.[3]
By the mid-1980s, advancements in computer graphics programs allowed matte painters to work in the digital realm. The first digital matte shot was created by painter Chris Evans in 1985 for Young Sherlock Holmes for a scene featuring a computer-graphics (CG) animation of a knight leaping from a stained-glass window. Evans first painted the window in acrylics, then scanned the painting into LucasFilm's Pixar system for further digital manipulation. The computer animation (another first) blended perfectly with the digital matte, which could not have been accomplished using a traditional matte painting.[4]
New technologies[edit]
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Throughout the 1990s, traditional matte paintings were still in use, but more often in conjunction with digital compositing. Die Hard 2 (1990) was the first film to use digitally composited live-action footage with a traditional glass matte painting that had been photographed and scanned into a computer. It was for the last scene, which took place on an airport runway.[5] By the end of the decade, the time of hand-painted matte paintings was drawing to a close, although as late as 1997 some traditional paintings were still being made, notably Chris Evans’ painting of the RMS Carpathia rescue ship in James Cameron’s Titanic.[6]
Paint has now been superseded by digital images created using photo references, 3-D models, and drawing tablets. Matte painters combine their digitally matte painted textures within computer-generated 3-D environments, allowing for 3-D camera movement.[7] Lighting algorithms used to simulate lighting sources expanded in scope in 1995, when radiosity rendering was applied to film for the first time in Martin Scorsese's Casino. Matte World Digital collaborated with LightScape to simulate the indirect bounce-light effect[8] of millions of neon lights of the 70s-era Las Vegas strip.[9] Lower computer processing times continue to alter and expand matte painting technologies and techniques. Matte painting techniques are also implemented in concept art and used often in games and even high end production techniques in animation in today's society.
Significant uses[edit]
- The army barracks in All Quiet On The Western Front (1930).
- Count Dracula's castle exteriors in Dracula (1931) and other scenes.
- The view of Skull Island in King Kong (1933).
- Charlie Chaplin's blindfold roller-skating beside the illusory drop in Modern Times (1936).
- The view of Nottingham Castle in The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938).
- The 1942 spy thriller Saboteur, directed by Alfred Hitchcock, is enhanced by numerous matte shots, ranging from a California aircraft factory to the climactic scene atop New York's Statue of Liberty. [1]
- Black Narcissus (1947) by Powell and Pressburger, scenes of the Hymalayan convent.
- In Alfred Hitchcock's North by Northwest (1959) shots of The United Nations building, Mount Rushmore and the Mount Rushmore house.
- Birds flying over Bodega Bay, looking down at the town below, in Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds (1963).
- Mary Poppins gliding over London with her umbrella (1964), the St Paul's Cathedral and London's rooftops and aerial views in Mary Poppins.
- The iconic image of the Statue of Liberty at the end of Planet of the Apes (1968).
- Diabolik (1968) directed by Mario Bava, extensive use of matte shots particularly Diabolik's underground lair.
- The rooftops of Portobello Road, the English landscape, Miss Price's house and other scenes in Bedknobs and Broomsticks (1971) (special effects won an Academy Award).
- The city railway line in The Sting (1973).
- Views of a destroyed Los Angeles in Earthquake (1974) for which Albert Whitlock won an Academy Award.
- Virtually all of the exterior shots of San Francisco in The Love Bug (1974).
- The stone column demolished by the locomotive in the Chicago station in the film Silver Streak.
- The Death Star's laser tunnel in Star Wars (1977).
- The Starfleet headquarters in Star Trek The Motion Picture (1979).
- The background for all scenes featuring Imperial walkers in The Empire Strikes Back (1980).
- The final scene of the secret government warehouse in Steven Spielberg's Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981).
- The Roy and Deckard chase scene in Blade Runner (1982).
- The view of the crashed space ship in The Thing (1982).
- The view of the OCP tower in RoboCop (1987) and other scenes.
- Gotham City street scene in Batman (1989).
- The Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array in Contact (1997).
- The Magic Railroad in Thomas and the Magic Railroad (2000).
- The cityscape behind the Barnums' first apartment in The Greatest Showman (2017).
Important traditional matte painters and technicians[edit]
See also[edit]
References[edit]
- ^Matte World Digital | SIGGRAPH 1998 – Matte Painting in the Digital Age | Traditional Matte Paintings | Craig Barron
- ^The Invisible Art: The Legends of Movie Matte Painting by Mark Cotta Vaz and Craig Barron, Chronicle Books, 2002; p. 33
- ^The Making of Star Wars as told by C-3PO and R2-D2, 1977, directed by Robert Guenette (glass painting technique explained at point 4'45')
- ^The Invisible Art, Cotta Vaz/Barron, pp. 213, 217
- ^The Invisible Art, Cotta Vaz/Barron, p. 227
- ^The Invisible Art, Cotta Vaz/Barron, p. 19
- ^Matte World Digital | SIGGRAPH 1998 – Matte Painting in the Digital Age | Great Expectations: Creating Movement | Craig Barron
- ^Matte World Digital | SIGGRAPH 1998 – Matte Painting in the Digital Age | 3-D Lighting Techniques | Craig Barron
- ^The Invisible Art, Cotta Vaz/Barron, pp. 244–248
Books[edit]
- Mark Cotta Vaz; Craig Barron: The Invisible Art: The Legends of Movie Matte Painting, Chronicle Books, 2002; ISBN0-8118-4515-X
- Peter Ellenshaw; Ellenshaw Under Glass – Going to the Matte for Disney
- Richard Rickitt: Special Effects: The History and Technique. Billboard Books; 2nd edition, 2007; ISBN0-8230-8408-6 (Chapter 5 covers the history and techniques of movie matte painting.)
Matte Painting Job
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Best Matte Painting Software Design
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