Matte Painting

So, as a pre cursor to getting into the animated/live action VFX, I thought I'd do  few pre-viz matte paintings to get the feel of the old faithful, Photoshop again.  Matte painting goes back a loooong way in the VFX/SFX industry. I'm sure you've all seen those amazing paintings in the background of some Hollywood lot of mountains or galaxies etc. Something a little like this no doubt: 

The classic Wizard of Oz matte paintings. Follow the yellow brick road. 

Needless to say with the advent of programs like Photoshop, Matte painting has moved on considerably since then. The art of matte painting now involves as many aspects as the compositing process, using CG, real life photo textures and good old fashion painting techniques. Here's a good example of what is now possible through the magic of computers.

Couracant from the new Star Wars films. Bad ass Shiz!

The technique for something like this would be a mixture of CG modelling basic geometry which is then passed to the Matte Painter to weave some magic and add the detail and subtitles by hand.
Not only is matte painting for the purpose of static (and sometimes dynamic) backdrops, but with the development of such 3D packages as Maya and Max, a matte painting can of touched up geometry can then be imported back into the 3D package and projected back onto the original geometry as a way of adding high quality texture and a level of precision that is not possible through 3D texturing alone.


Anyway, here's a few Pre Viz matte paintings I've done on a quick snap I took of the Avon Gorge here in Bristol. They're just matte tests to get a bit more practice in Photoshop, but the process of making these shots has given me a glimpse at the possibilities of matte painting. 

These 3 shots are all the same photo and I was having a little play with the history of the Avon Gorge playing with some visualizations of Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow.
Still very rough but a worth while exercise!