Into the depths - WIP

Here's another WIP, a personal project and a fully digital environment shot.

I built 3D environment, animated the elevator and the camera move. The next stage will be UV-ing and texturing the foreground elements and planning various matte projections, placing them in such a way as to show great depth of the city and many levels below. Once all the projections are created, scene will be rendered in several passes and comped in Nuke. With this project I'll practice some new stuff like DOF pass and 3D motion blur.

Underpass - WIP

New matte in progress, something more photo-realistic this time - an exercise from integrating greenscreen footage into a matte based on a plate. Using myself and my cheap pocket camcorder, I acquired a suitable footage of a wandering bum, that was keyed out and rotoscoped quite a bit (bad lighting, good production practice :) I'll be aiming at post-apocalyptic mood, something in a spirit of 'The Road' or 'The Book of Eli'. I'll post the final matte and comp soon.

Happy New Chinese Year, by the way :)

Jade Castle

New personal matte, done entirely in Photoshop. With this piece, I was aiming at achieving a dramatic sky, interesting lighting and mood. The architecture is a mixture of medieval and Asian style. Hope you guys like it.

I also created a pretty long tutorial in Polish, describing creation of a typical matte step by step. Tutorial can be downloaded here:

Matte painting tutorial (Polish version)
click here to download (1.92 mb)

Concrete hive - 3D matte painting

A frame from camera projection of a pretty complex 3D matte, basically a digital environment, created as a practice of multi-camera mapping. The city (over 600k polys) was created in 3D, together with 10 projection cameras displaying various pieces of matte in a way that allowed horizontal camera move. Geometry and cameras were then imported into Nuke and comped. Additional animations, like smoke and ships, were added on cards and placed accordingly in Nuke's 3D space. The whole sequence, rendered in 2k, ended in After Effects, where the final tweaks were applied. You can check the finished projection in the portfolio ('Matte painting' section, at the bottom) or here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6t-dTvXsYxM

Additionally, a couple of screenshots from Nuke - 3D overview of the entire scene and the comp tree:

The Arrival - Shot 1

Here's the matte for the first shot from this project. Done in 4k, 16 bit. The clip is available in HD here (though it's quite dark, don't know why). Matte was projected onto 3D geometry within Nuke and comped, forming quite a nice tree:


Additional stuff includes 3D airship with simple effects, waterfall (particles in 3dsMax), various bits of moving fog, clouds, water blinks, etc.

More matte paintings and digital environments coming soon, more advanced and with more elaborate compositing tricks.

The Arrival - WIP1

Here's the first preview of the shots I mentioned. 'The Arrival' is a series of six shots, fully CG, accomplished with matte painting projections, live-action and digital sets. I'm putting them together for practice and presentation purposes. Sequence will also include things like particle simulations and 3D animation.

As you can see from this WIP, each shot has been initially layed out in 3D and then concept art was created for each, to figure out basic lighting and what elements are needed to accomplish the task. Some shots are less difficult, some are quite complex, like the last one, Shot 6, where live-action of multiple characters is mixed with 3D foreground environment, 3D matte painting of the mountains, HDRI render of the animated ship and a bunch of other stuff, eventually comped together. Lots of fun ;)

A piece of the action

Here's a sneak-peak into the series mentioned in the previous post. Highway hit by a courageous chick on a bike and space marines approaching the enemy base.

Currently, I'm working on 'The Arrival' - a sequence mentioned some post ago - several shots, based on matte painting projections, with an addition of 3D digital environment and greenscreen footage. Hopefully, it'll be ready in about a month. I'll post some mini-tutorials with it (e.g. using DEM maps in Vue or complex NUKE matte painting projections), as well as a behind-the-scenes article.

Right now, a few simple tutorials I did on NUKE in the past are available but only in Polish for the time being (sorry). New tutorials will be both, in Polish and English. The old ones are available below:

Projekcje matte w NUKE

Tutorial 1: Symulowana kamera 2.5D w NUKE: tutaj + pliki robocze tutaj
Tutorial 2: Projekcja 2.5D in NUKE (prosta): tutaj + pliki robocze j.w.
Tutorial 3: Projekcja 2.5D in NUKE (złożona): tutaj + pliki robocze tutaj