Matte Painting Resources

[Suirebit-3DT]

Here are a couple of on-site resources for those who seek to find out more about digital matte painting. Check out this thread often to see updates.

Interviews

• Dylan Cole
• Frederick St.Arnaud
• Tim Warnock
• Alp Altiner

Tutorials/Making of-s

• Making Of The Lost World: Temple of Nature by Tiberius Viris
• Making of London National History Museum by Sorin Bechira
• The Making of The Decline of Babel Myth – Jacobsen War by Frederick St-Arnaud
• Fantasy View of Budapest by Kornel Ravadits
• The Castle by Dragos Jieanu

What's Matte Painting?

"Digital Matte Painting combines digital painting, photo manipulation and 3D in order to create "virtual sets" that are otherwise hard, if not impossible (and nevertheless not cost effective), to find in the real world. Traditional matte painting was developed initially for the movies and was done optically, by painting on top of a piece of glass to be composited with the original footage, but nowadays, matte painting is done in computers with the use of a tablet as
a drawing device and 3d software.

Matte Painted scenes are used widely for any kind of application that requires a virtual set, but, of course, movies are still the ones who use it the most. The goal here is to produce realistic environments (sets) where actors can perform as if they were there.

Basically, in modern movies, the actors are performing on a small area called “active set” or “platform”. This can be
a studio room (like the weather forecasts which are filmed against a blue/green background), an outside platform or even a real environment. It’s then the job of the matte painter to change everything around them and to make it blend with the active set.

Matte Painting can be used to create entire new sets, or to extend portions of an existing set; It became a true trend
of the new century and it has a bright future, together with the relatively new 2.5D and 3D compositing techniques."

[femina]

Well, I tried to apply it to painted wood with a nylon brush and it looks streaky and I don’t think it will stay on. This is on the bottom trim in the staircase. I love the gold color and don't want to dilute that, but maybe I should mix the paint with paint or clear polyurethane? What would that do to the acrylic gold paint? How can I paint my wood trim with folk art pure gold acrylic paint? Do I need to prepare the wood first?