Hey Guys, Im looking forward to making a matte painting portfolio, in which im considering to use blender for camera projection and mapping, alongside photoshop and nuke as my tools for painting and compositing respectively. But Im having a very hard time finding tutorials and guides regarding this particular workflow anywhere on the internet. So I really need some direction on how to proceed, and also what problems would I have for these software to interoperate? For the most part I would be working in photoshop for my concepts and final paintings, and then for camera projection Im planning to use Blender. Are there any tutorials I can follow somewhere, that I havent found or seen yet ??
By coincedence I came across this tutorial competition recently:
http://www.cgmasters.net/contests/blender-video-tutorial-contest/
There are many interesting tuts there, including one on camera mapping. Blender is very usefull for mattepainting style vfx, especially since the Tears of Steel additions. You might not even need a separate compositor like AE or Nuke.
Thanks for the link but I already happened to check that link before and it was quite good nonetheless. And yeah I will use blender as a compositor as long as I really dont feel a dire need of nuke, but having it included just in case. But I wanted to really see how well blender come across in camera projection. Are there any other way except that project from view way? Are there some specialized tools for such thing? I saw some early videos about camera mapping and they made use of the sticky mapping which isnt there anymore. And how does UV project modifier work in this regard ? And is there any addon for blender for importing psd files with layers?
I like this channel for clear demonstrations, but not in English.
Hello Daulat !
where are you from ??
By coincidence, i’m setting my MattePainting portfolio too. Hope i can share it online in within a few weeks.
Well, since i’ve learned how to use blender i’m trying to work with it as a 3D tool in MattePainting. Not only for camera projections, but for modeling, simulations (water, smoke, atmosferics, rain. etc), roto and even for composition.
At the begining most people on the industry laugh and said: forget blender, use maya.
I have to admit that maya have a way more stablished workflow for a film pipeline, and awesome tools like this: http://www.glyphfx.com/mptk.html
And i have to admit that blender have some bad issues for DMP. But issues that in my opinion are very easy to fix in future versions.
Well, nobody should laugh on blender… and nobody can forget the REAL PURPOSE of matte painting: create the illusion of photo-realistic environments, with the smallest budget, the shortest time available, and with the less work possible.
Simple, beautiful, fast, cheap, original and intelligent.
So having this in mind, and knowing that blender and maya are just tools i insisted.
I don’t have any tutorial for you (there are some basic ones, like andrew’s camera mapping blender… just google it), but some points:
- Modeling
Modeling for paintover is really fast and easy in blender. Besides that you have blendswap wich is great for models. And cycles is awesome for shadowpasses.
But the bad issue: Exporting alpha masks for objects or faces is no good. Alpha masks have a weird antialias, and object id is bad as well.
What a do most of the time is move the object i want to export the mask to another layer, and render only this object silhouete. I’m sucessfull sometimes using the really fast OPENgl render. (not only for alpha masks, but for a lot of other tasks)
check this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rucViosnu0k for openGL rendering. It can save your time.
Ahhhh and now with Dynamic Sculpting it is superb for creating rocks, mountains, debris, whatever !! Now sculpting is powerfull in blender.
- Camera Mapping
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I normally use the ‘project from view’ option when i uvunrap my geometry, but recently i have found a great modifier called UVProject wich is great, especially for multi camera projecting. It’s great but have an issue: it distorts the image and i have to manually set .76 or something like that, to scale down on everything. I’m pretty sure it’s my fault on pixel aspect, or something related to lens… but for now i just manually undistort my projections.
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Remember to subdivide your geometry a little bit. I mean: don’t use 4 vertex cards to project onto. The UV maps get lost with few vertices. If you’re facing weird projections, try to subdivide your mesh once or twice.
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If your shadows are baked in your painting, use blender internal with shadeless materials for final render. It’s fast and no grain.
But, if your camera moves a lot, or is flying trough a corridor or whatever you need your shadows to move, use cycles. More work, more time to set, and more time to render… but good results. You can combine shadeless materials in blendere with others that receive shadows and speccialy global illumination/light bounces.
I really hope that Blender’s developer give more attention to MattePainting techniques in the future… maybe we should create a thread, or a forum only with this maters: DMP and Blender.
Hope i can see your work. And share more experience.
all the best,
Norberto
Hey, thanks for you extensive and valuable information. I couldnt respond to the post as I assumed not many are really interested in matte painting and camera mapping creations here ignored my post. But its really great to find someone who is interested in Matte painting. And yeah I think it would be better if we create a thread regarding this separately for the ones who are interested in this.
And regarding myself, I live in India, I learned art in a traditional way, and from last few years i completely switched to digital media. I always had an interest in matte painting and concept art. And so I started learning the secrets and methodologies of this art form. I was really inspired by the artists like Dylan cole, and chris stoski and really followed their paintings. And now Im making a portfolio, and currently use blender,photoshop and Nuke, and thinking of buying Cinema 4D. There really arent much tutorials for camera projection in blender and was really disappointed when I saw almost no one in this forum seem to be doing this or interested in.
Its something I recently started learning, I used to make paintings completely in just photoshop and had no knowledge of camera projection techniques. And in last 6 months Ive learned a great deal but I wanted to learn how blender handled this, and does it provide professional results. Coz I dont want to buy C4d for just Camera projection.
Many techniques can be reproduced in Blender. If no one is doing this then you should do it and be the master! Show every one how to do it. Good luck can’t wait to learn
Aren’t matte paintings better done with something like Photoshop or Gimp? What’s the advantage of doing them in Blender?
Aren’t matte paintings better done with something like Photoshop or Gimp? What’s the advantage of doing them in Blender?
For still Matte Paintings photoshop and Gimp are enough, but where there is a need to create camera animation through the matte painting, without going through camera projection in a 3D software like Blender, you would have very flat, and 2d looking motion, with no parallax and convincing space and scale. Camera projection is a very important part of present matte painting workflows.
Funny how in movies there are rarely any lateral trucking shots that demonstrate parallax. Most establishing shots are pans or tilts over nodal point, which is why old matte paintings worked ok. But dolly shots do sell a trick shot much better.
Blender’s use in matte paintings is brilliantly covered by concept artist/illustrator David Revoy (of Sintel fame) in Blend & Paint:
http://www.blender3d.org/e-shop/product_info_n.php?products_id=134
It’s definitely worth checking out. It doesn’t cover Blender exclusively but it’s an interesting approach in that it uses 3d software to create volumes/shapes/shades and then takes it up in Gimp to finish it. I don’t really know the first thing about matte painting (or painting in general) but from what I’ve seen, famous matte painters such as Dylan Cole or Feng Zhu seem to use PS only (could be deadly wrong here though).
@Blendercomp: Feng Zhu is more of a concept artist than a matte painter. And so He rarely uses any 3D. Dylan cole used to work fully in photoshop for matte paintings, but now uses Cinema 4D for 3D stuffs and Camera projection coz C4D plays extremely well with photoshop and other Adobe products, much better than any other software and there are many tools in C4D specifically designed with matte painters in mind like Projection man.
Well David is also a concept artist so I wonder how his techniques apply to matte painting. Have you looked at his tutorials/work?
What David has done in his tutorial is make a base model of all the 3D scene and take the render into a painting app like photoshop, gimp, mypaint etc and paint over the model. Techniques like that are more often in creating environments for Games. That is a very different thing from a matte painting. In matte painting, the paintings are done first, and ofcourse some simple 3D models can be utilized for the things like architectural details and such, that require some amount of precision, but the rest everything is done by painting.
After the paintings are done, the layers are reorganized for camera projection in 3D software, with proper alpha channels, and brought into the software. Then according to the painting layers, simple geometries are created as would be appropriate for each paint layer, and projected through a camera onto the geometry. The geometry created for each paint layers are created with the scale of the paintings in mind to fake the parallax effect between the various components of the painting like FG, MG and BG. And when all the layers are projected to the corresponding geometry, a render or animating camera is created to create limited motion through the projected painting.