Digital Matte Painting
Module Progress Documentation
Here shows my entire progress from Exercise 1 to the Final Project from April 2020 to Aug 2020.
Exercise - Values
For the this exercise, we were to add values to the perspective drawings.
Exercise - Photobashing Exercise
The third exercise, I was quite excited because photo-manipulation used to be my favourite thing to play around back when I was learning photoshop by myself. We were to find photos and photobash them into a composition we wanted to work on for the aforementioned Project 2. After that we have to pay attention to areas that we were to animate in Project 2 to test our ability to create invisible set extensions and make it believable. Below is my initial draft.
Project 1 - Virtual Plein Air
Plein Air is what traditional painters used to practice their skills and techniques by painting live nature scenery. In this digital age, there's a digital painting version of it and its the same term just added a "Virtual" in the front. For this project, we were tasked to digitally paint 3 virtual Plein Air from own selected pictures. One of the conditions and challenge were that we were not to colorpick from the reference images we chose. Below are some progressions compilations.
Project 2 - Invisible Set Extension
Pandemic
Digital Matte Painting Project 2 - Set Extension
Following the prep composition we did in the third exercise from before. In this project, we were tasked to create a set extension composition and then animate it to have subtle animations in After Effects. Due to the current pandemic, I have a pretty clear idea of that kind of set I wanted to create. I wanted to create a composition that shows the aftermath of a street if humans did not follow the Movement Control Order.
I proceeded to gather images that inspires my composition to my moodboard.
After getting the moodboard done, I proceed to search around the internet for images and elements that is suitable for my scene.
Throughout the whole process, Mr Kannan has pointed out that the importance of scale of the human, building, windows and the elements, because if it doesn't look logical, it can break the illusion of the set. He pointed out that the lighting of the buildings are all over the places and i have to decide on a point of light source and make amendments on that.
Below will be my process stages in gif format
Final Composition
After that, I moved on to animating the scene in After Effects. I've used some stock footage I've collected over the years from actionvfx.com and youtube. And below is the final rendered video. The lighting and colour grading is not 100% similar to the original composition as After Effects doesn't have Gradient Map and I've used it heavily in my Photoshop file.
Overall I'm happy with how it turned out though Mr Kannan pointed out that some parts of the building looks obvious that I've copy and pasted it into the scene and highlights are still too bright.
Project 3 - Invisible Set Extension 2
In the project we were tasked to do similar what we did in Project 2, but instead of 1 set, we were to do 3 of them. Below are my moodboard and some sketches and value studies for the project.
After my thumbnail and value studies, I am to select 3 of them to work with.
I have made some minor changes in some of the set, and my final selections is number 2, 3, and 4. Unfortunately, due to time constraints, I did not have progress recorded to be shown except number 4's initial trial blockout.
Below are the final results.
The animated results.
In conclusion, I wish that I can polish my work in this module more but sadly due to other module's workload, I had to finish this quickly, still I am quite happy of the result because it was done in very short time, imagine if I have more time.
