Animated matte paintings

Artwork Finished Projects
1

Hi guys.
I finally found the time at the weekend to finish a project I’d started quite a long time ago. The still image shows an environment modelled and textured in Blender and rendered in Vray Standalone Beta (using Andrey’s script).
The animation (click here) shows a slightly simpler version of the scene, cut in several layers and projected back onto the scene’s original geometry using camera projection. I added a camera movement, while the ships were rendered separately in BI with AAO and the scene’s original sun light.
The animation also shows a mountain landscape animation based on the same idea. For this, I rendered my basic base landscape in Terragen and projected it onto relatively simple geometry in Blender for the animation.
This is not perfect, of course. I had some compositing problems with the ships (maybe someone can help with suggestions there), and the camera projection method only allows a very limited amount of camera movement in the scene (again, maybe someone has an idea how to go about doing this). In any case, C&Cs much welcome.

EDIT: I forgot to mention that the city was heavily inspired by a scene from the latest Star Trek feature.

http://www.bertrand-benoit.com/images/COMPs.jpg

2

Very professional looking environments, the architecture looks great. The only thing I would say is that the lighting on the ships you’ve composited in with the bi in the flythrough doesn’t really match up, seems to dark to me. Great work never the less

3

Beautiful job man !!! I’m really glad you tried this trick, I was thinking to use this technique for my short and I’m pleased to see it works like a charm.

4

Hi Bertrand,

Beautiful image ! I should try to model one of those dreaming places, very inspiring. I really like the hot halo behind the ships, nice detail. Very nice mix of serveral render systems, did you use the old version of terragen or the last one ? Have you consider to use the matte function of VRay ? The ships need some more work, can’t put my finger on the problem, maybe lighting, don’t know exactely but that’s great anyway.

5

Thanks Enrico.
Yep, not too happy about how the ships integrate in the composite but I can’t put my finger on it either. Plus I think they’re also a bit slow. I thought of this more as a proof of concept but I might have another go at it.
Otherwise, I can’t really make sense of Vray’s matte function.
(Yes, it’s Terragen 2, which is weird but great)

6

Very nice cinematic effect !

Thats really inspiring. And the technique you used here can help a lot in cutting the rendertime and yet have very convincing results.

The ships do indeed look a bit out of place, it may be the same problem you have when matching life footage with cg elements. Did you use a linear workflow for the BI rendered ships ? If not this may help in better integrating these objects.

How much ‘fiddling’ with the compositor was necessary to get result we see here ?

7

Loramel: Thx man. There was quite a bit of fiddling. Having said that, I started with a simple node network, which got very complicated, then a lot simpler again when I realised things were just getting worse the more complicated they were.
The real time-consuming step here is not the compositing, though. It’s rendering the main scene into five or six layers to project back onto the geometry. You really need to think strategically about which building will move and reveal what’s behind them. The more layers you have, the more freedom of movement you get with the camera.

8

Excellent job BbB.
4*

9

I can image that :slight_smile:

In this current scene, what would you say is the maximum area in which you can move the camera, or other put, when rotating the camera around a center point of your scene looking at this center, what is the maximum angle you can cover before you start to notice visible distortions.

10

Looks great, but the ships don’t seem to fit in the scenes, the lighting seems off, maybe some lighting adjustments and masks so they go behind buildings and things like that to make them fit in the scene better…possibly some atmospheric effects on that first one (looks like you might have some…but maybe make it more intense?)

11

This is awesome. Did you use the new atmospheric lighting in 2.48? The texturing makes the picture really pop. (The ships in the top right look very duplicated. they could use some variation in coloring or at least rotation.) Still, very awesome!:smiley:

12

Very interesting work, I feel transported to the place looking at it, it does feel like a classic matte painting to me…

only CC is there should be one red building :wink:

It does look very much like a planned city built all at once with a industrial goal.

Very good Scifi.

13

BbB, it’s great to see that you went for 2.5D camera projection and matte painting technique because that’s where photo real animations are going to come from. ;-).

I have a few questions on the cityscape.

I ask this every time someone does Camera Projection with Blender, did you use the UVProject Modifer or ‘stickys’? hehe.

Hopefully UVProject?

I think the idea of camera projection onto simple 3D is to give you some parallax with simple camera moves, panning and a little zooming in if you’ve done your mattes at 4K for say 1920x1080 HD you should have latitude to zoom in a little as well as pan. Your foreground objects would need to be simple 3D forms for the 2.5D but the further back buildings would suffice on planes with space in front and behind to achieve the parallax. Was that your approach?

Not sure how you went about it but in theory if you use a UV layer for each of your foreground buildings, where the camera move exposes unmapped areas of your model you need to ‘underpaint’ the texture maps, maybe Campbells Projection Painting build would make that easier where you paint extra texture cloned from your renders onto the UV layer onto the exposed areas of the model, running the camera move back and forth to check coverage until your happy with the extra painting.

Is your sky separate? Could you use an animated sky for more effect? Same for the water maybe just an animated spec map over what you have to give a bit of glisten?

Also the lens flare, as the camera moves that would move to I guess so again could you do an animated flare effect and comp it after?

Finally, the steam/smoke how about comping in some video practical effects from somewhere like http://www.detonationfilms.com/Stock_Directory.html they do quite a lot of free keyed footage of smoke / explosions etc. Slot them in on planes in the background gaps between the buildings maybe.

All adds to the believability.

Great to see you perhaps moving in the camera projection direction, especially with regard to your interiors, it would be great to see the same techniques used there with some green screen people moving within the interiors etc. :slight_smile:

Good stuff. :slight_smile:

Have you checked out the podcasts on www.fxguide.com there are some great tips on technique and how they use camera projection for the movies. www.vfxtalk.com is another great site for help and tutorials, some real good stuff there. Maybe check out Dylan Cole, Chris Stoski and Nuke tutorials for more inspiration and techniques to transfer to blender.

14

I think tha’ts the same for any project, imho need to decide on the final shots first before even touching blender, what an individual wants to achieve, storyboard it, consider aspect ratio, cinematic framing, positioning of camera and camera moves and effects, subject matter.

Then decide what is really needed to be modeled and textured, what can be matte’s from digital images in gimp or photoshop etc, where to use video/animated effects and work back from the finished shots on a storyboard only modelling, texturing and rendering what really needs to be done to get the results.

Then an individual can concentrate on a storyline, simple camera animation, cinematography and color grading rather than wrestling for weeks trying to render a single frame with Lux or Indigo after modeling absolutely everything infinite detail with no time or idea how to texture it all, with stupid render times, to end up with a couple of semi photoreal images for all the hard work and time. :slight_smile:

15

Yellow: Yes, I guess that’s how one should go about it - first the goal, then the means. I went about this one the other way round, because I’m just doing for fun and to learn a thing or two. I first did the matte painting then thought, “wouldn’t it be cool to move around it?”

To answer your questions:

  • I know you will be disappointed but I used “sticky”, because that’s how I learnt it. I’m not sure about the UVProject method, but perhaps it’s better. What would be the advantages? The “Campbell” method you describe (using several images to create the texture at different keyframes) sounds very interesting… Tell me more.

  • In this case, the matte painting is projected back onto the scene’s original geometry (including on every single 20,000-poly tree!). I know this sounds like a lot of geometry, but BI doesn’t do any light calculation so it’s still incredibly fast to render and it gives you real 3D when moving the camera around - i.e. more freedom of movement.

  • Instead of starting with one matte painting, I first rendered several layers of buildings (just water; foreground buildings; mid-ground; mid-ground 2; background; naked sky; trees…) For each render, I used the previous render as a background mapped to screen in order to avoid the matte border effect. I then composited all the layers into one multi-layered image in Photoshop using the .pngs’ alpha channels and painting a little to smooth the transition between the layers (I added some atmospheric effect in post).
    Back in Blender, I merged the meshes of the objects in order to end up with the same number of objects as I had render layers. I then projected each layer onto its corresponding object. Again, this gave me a lot more freedom of movement than I would have had just using the “clone-painting” approach.
    (For the Terragen animation I used very basic 3D shapes for projection)

  • I could (or should) have rendered the water object like the shio (i.e. in BI and not using camera projection) because right now it’s like a flat painting of water, it doesn’t actually reflect the buildings. I think the absence of moving/changing reflection is the main shortcoming of this method.

  • Animated lens flare, possibly moving behind buildings) would be easily doable in After Effects, though I’m not sure how I would do it in Blender… It would look fantastic too! So would the animated smoke stacks!

(thanks for the podcast details - I’ll check those out).

Carbon: Thx a lot man. Really glad you like it.

padfoot7726: I used the atmospherics for the ships. Didn’t turn out so well. For some reason I find that it tends to darken things too much. The atmo in the matte painting is almost completely post.

tcrazy: You’re right about the ships.

loramel: Right now I have quite a lot of freedom of movement given the approach I chose (plus I rendered the original matte at 3,000 pixels). I can do pretty much everything short of looking at the back of the buildings. The main problem though is that you quickly reach the border of the image, so you can’t actually rotate the camera as much as you would want to because you quickly start seeing black borders at the edges. I solved that to an extent when doing the Terragen animation by initially rendering a very wide angle image and projecting it back in Blender using a wide angle camera (something like 15). When animating, I used a much longer lens, which gave me a lot more slack to pan and rotate. I couldn’t do that for the city because I had done the still before deciding to animate the scene and I had to work with a pretty long lens to start with.

16

Any chance of a wireframe?

17

Oh, I assumed after seeing KevinW’s Overhaul Underground you thought you’d have a go. sorry.

To answer your questions:

  • I know you will be disappointed but I used “sticky”, because that’s how I learnt it. I’m not sure about the UVProject method, but perhaps it’s better. What would be the advantages? The “Campbell” method you describe (using several images to create the texture at different keyframes) sounds very interesting… Tell me more.
    Two separate things i think. Under painting your projected textures, ie the sides of your buildings where textures get stretched or just missing as the camera exposes them, could maybe be painted easier in place using this build:

http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=139677&highlight=projection+paint+build

The UVProject Modifier (if it actually works as per any other projector in say Nuke or Max) allows multiple cameras (converted to projectors) to be setup along your virtual camera path and each projector can project additional textures onto the sides of your buildings when they become exposed by your virtual camera. Chris Stokis Camera Projection and Set Extension tutorials show this well although done with 3D Studio Max.

  • In this case, the matte painting is projected back onto the scene’s original geometry (including on every single 20,000-poly tree!). I know this sounds like a lot of geometry, but BI doesn’t do any light calculation so it’s still incredibly fast to render and it gives you real 3D when moving the camera around - i.e. more freedom of movement.
    Hey cool, I suppose the difference here is that as you have already modeled, textured and rendered the buildings then it’s more straightforward, if one was working solely with photographs and video plates to generate the mattes then maybe it’s more of a ball ache to model everything when planes would probably surfice further back and stuff like trees could be cards as well but in two axis’s crossed.
  • Instead of starting with one matte painting, I first rendered several layers of buildings (just water; foreground buildings; mid-ground; mid-ground 2; background; naked sky; trees…) For each render, I used the previous render as a background mapped to screen in order to avoid the matte border effect. I then composited all the layers into one multi-layered image in Photoshop using the .pngs’ alpha channels and painting a little to smooth the transition between the layers (I added some atmospheric effect in post).
    Back in Blender, I merged the meshes of the objects in order to end up with the same number of objects as I had render layers. I then projected each layer onto its corresponding object. Again, this gave me a lot more freedom of movement than I would have had just using the “clone-painting” approach.
    (For the Terragen animation I used very basic 3D shapes for projection)
    Thanks for detailing the process.
  • I could (or should) have rendered the water object like the shio (i.e. in BI and not using camera projection) because right now it’s like a flat painting of water, it doesn’t actually reflect the buildings. I think the absence of moving/changing reflection is the main shortcoming of this method.
    Yes, definetly or cheat. :slight_smile:
  • Animated lens flare, possibly moving behind buildings) would be easily doable in After Effects, though I’m not sure how I would do it in Blender… It would look fantastic too! So would the animated smoke stacks!
    I was thinking more of the gimp with gap for the lens flare png sequence comp’d in blender.

(thanks for the podcast details - I’ll check those out).
Thank you. There’s an incredible amount of info and examples of these types of techniques and pretty much every new feature film uses them. :slight_smile:

loramel: Right now I have quite a lot of freedom of movement given the approach I chose (plus I rendered the original matte at 3,000 pixels). I can do pretty much everything short of looking at the back of the buildings. The main problem though is that you quickly reach the border of the image, so you can’t actually rotate the camera as much as you would want to because you quickly start seeing black borders at the edges. I solved that to an extent when doing the Terragen animation by initially rendering a very wide angle image and projecting it back in Blender using a wide angle camera (something like 15). When animating, I used a much longer lens, which gave me a lot more slack to pan and rotate. I couldn’t do that for the city because I had done the still before deciding to animate the scene and I had to work with a pretty long lens to start with.
Not uncommon for images over 20,000 pixels wide to accomodate the panning. Check out these monsters, some downloadable. :slight_smile:

http://www.dusso.com/pages/EP3/EP3main.html

Or other cyclorama’s like Double Negative did for ‘Flyboys’ and other movies. :slight_smile:

http://www.fxguide.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=374

http://www.dneg.com/projects/flyboys_12.html

18

Thanks for the refs. These are great. I knew about Dusso’s work on SW but I’d never seen his site. These are fantastic images!

19

It looks perfect for me. Well done.

20

Sorry call me dumb but what do i need to view the annimation, it downloads and then nothing. Really want to see it.

Thnx.