Digital Matte Painting - Exercise

23/9/2024 - 18/11/2024
Week 1 - Week 9
Ng Jia Ern 0363033
Digital Matte Painting
Exercise

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INSTRUCTION

You will undergo a series of exercises that will enhance your understanding of matte as listed below:

• Perspective Studies (Landscapes and Interiors)
• Compositions
• Value Studies
• Sky replacements
• Virtual Plain Air
• 2.5D mattes
• Invisible Set Extensions

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Exercise Compilation:

2.5D Mattes Exercise:

FEEDBACK

REFLECTION

Sky Replacement

I find this process fairly straightforward, as Photoshop already has a built-in Sky Replacement feature (Edit > Sky Replacement). The presets provided can handle skies for various times of the day and even help with basic color adjustments to the original image. However, further tweaking based on personal judgment is often necessary. If you want to use a custom sky image, I found a helpful YouTube tutorial that explains the process and even offers free HD sky textures, which is great for learning. 

One challenge with sky replacement is dealing with strong lighting in the original image, which creates shadows. The direction of the shadows becomes an issue if the sun's position in the replaced sky doesn’t match the light source in the original image. I haven’t found a better solution for this yet, so I manually painted over the original shadows to adjust them to the correct direction.

Virtual Plein Air

I really enjoyed this exercise because it’s simply about painting based on reference images, so there’s no need to think too much about perspective, light, or color. That said, this practice is excellent for improving our grasp of light and color in landscapes. The challenge lies in color and shape recognition. Some objects, like trees, have complex shapes, making it tricky to simplify them while retaining their essence. Achieving realistic textures and colors is also tough because our eyes can deceive us—what we perceive as one color may actually be different. This is definitely something that requires a lot of practice to master.

2.5D Mattes

This was a fresh experience for me, as it was my first time using the 3D Camera feature in Adobe After Effects. After watching a few YouTube tutorials on creating 3D effects with 2D images, I gave it a try. It was quite challenging. Since I used photobashed images, the main issue was that the camera's range of movement was limited—if I moved the camera too much, the illusion would break because the images weren’t large enough. This could be better managed if I were working with hand-painted scenes by planning the camera movement beforehand and adding extra painted areas beyond the frame to allow for smoother transitions.