About Matte Painting
What’s it for?
The purpose of matte painting in movies or on TV is to create environments that don’t actually exist. The Lord of the Rings movies for example made extensive use of matte painting, check this nice example by Yanick Dusseault.
The term “Matte Painting” is probably a bit misleading. Personally, I’m pretty rubbish at painting anything totally from scratch. I’m really just a 3D artist and that’s how I got into it. Painting from scratch – on glass to be precise – is exactly how matte painting started in 1907 though. Wikipedia has a nice bit of text about the history of it all here.
Matte Painting Today
Nowadays matte painting is generally a combination of 3D geometry and projected images. Those images can of course be painted from scratch but using and combining photos of vegetation, mountains, cityscapes etc is usually more practical. Making a scene entirely in 3D and then painting on top of that to add additional detail is another method. Or why not combine everything? There really are no limits to that.
2.5D? What’s that?
It depends on the amount of camera movement and how much the perspective changes whether you can get away with 1 single big matte painting or whether parts of the 3D scene need individual attention. You might hear the terms “camera mapping” and “2.5D” in combination with matte painting – well, simply said, 2D images projected (from the camera’s point of view) onto 3D geometry equals 2.5D. Why use matte painting? Because painting or texturing only the parts of the 3D scene that are actually seen by the camera saves a lot of time.
Sometimes the camera moves too much for matte painting – if it moves through a 3D cityscape, revealing new buildings as it moves along, you might as well texture each building individually and the only actual matte painting might be the sky. Likewise, if the camera doesn’t move at all or the image just pans across the view without any change in perspective (this change in perspective is also called parallax), there’s no need for any 3D geometry. So occasionally I make a matte painting entirely in Photoshop. I use whatever means necessary to create a cg environment and each project is different. It never gets boring!
Just show me a movie!
Okay, enough talk. If this is all too much gibberish, here is a movie of the camera mapping process in the 3D software I use – Cinema 4D. It’s a simplified walkthrough of a more complex tutorial I wrote a few years ago which you can find here. Fast forward to about halfway if you’re not that interested in the technicalities at the start.
I can also recommend www.mattepainting.org if you want to get into matte painting yourself or if you just like looking at the pretty pictures in their showcase forum.
