What is Matte Painting?
Matte painting is a film technique that combines art and lives action to create the illusion of an environment that is not present at the filming location, and that would otherwise be too expensive, inconvenient, or impossible to live film. Matte painting is both traditional form and its current digital form.
Click on Below Video: Digital Matte Painting Tutorial: The Three Types of Perspective
6 Things you need to know about Matte Painting
1. What is it and How Has it Created?
Matte Painting is a technique used for decades in films with a wide range of uses also in the world of illustrations and video games. It allows one to illustrate in detail, non-existent or hard to reach sceneries. The real technique consisted of hand painting on large glass sheets which were the backgrounds integrated into the live-action films. Hand painting itself gives an idea of the length of time once required in film production. In the process given one small error, all of the work would be lost! That is how artists worked until the 80’s when artists began to work with digital, big thanks to computer graphics.
2. How is it Done?
Digital images and artists have completely replaced paintings have had to modify it quickly to the knowledge and use of software for image retouching. Adobe Photoshop software is an integral part of the process. Thanks to graphics quality tablets and users creativity, it certainly guarantees the best possible results. Professional use of this prominent software is the key to excellence.
Click on Below Video: Matte Painting for Beginners
3. Advantages of Digital Creativity
Saving time in production leads to a reduction in costs. Making mistakes nowadays doesn’t certainly mean you have to throw away all your work done as in hand-painting. The static method becomes dynamic. The landscape components can instantly change as well as the insights and ideas of the creative artist.
4. Key Phases of Matte Painting
A. Implementation of a Concept
This is the moment where the artist can be integrating elements, creative from his imagination with the existing ones, potentially inspired by photographs of real place or illustrations. An analysis of some scene elements such as prospect and atmosphere is essential.
B. Finding Reference
Some Matte Painters create and continuously update their gallery of images, looking for nice places, immortalizing them within the photographs of a digital camera. It is not uncommon that these artists are photography enthusiasts who have been training in this field. Collecting reference data is a fundamental step of the process. The better the starting image is, the smaller the amount of time it takes to create the desired background.
C. Color Correction
The color correction is performed with Photoshop in the implementation phase. Ultimately, the correction can be performed during the compositing phase, using the specified software.
5. Essential Elements of Matte Painting
The purpose of matte painting is to provide great backgrounds and ensure that they appear real to the watcher. Therefore the prospect is an element of fundamental importance. Understanding and knowing the perspective and the vanishing points, allows you to “naturalize” what does not exist in reality. All this should be followed by in-depth knowledge of the use of color, composition, depth and lighting to create credible spaces to be perfectly integrated into a film or advertising on television.
6. Matte Painting
There is a vital difference between the traditional and Digital Matte Painting. Unlike the first one, the digital creative profession cannot surely be cataloged as individual work. Digital Matte Painting is a part of a process which is linked to other areas of the visual effects such as texturing, compositing and 3D animation among others. All under the VFX supervisor able to coordinate and guide the team to create a product up to its expectations and give the watcher the illusion that keeps us suspended between the fantasy and the real world.
Click on Below Video: Matte Painting Tips
Matte painting has gone through significant changes in the last century, but as a film technique, it’s here to stay. And there’s plenty of demand for great matte painters with a strong vision and sense of imagination.
