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Matte Painting Basics and the Static Camera Shot

by Heather Abels

In addition to creating a beautiful matte painting shot, this course takes you through all the best practice basics and unspoken rules of matte painting and helps you develop good professional working habits.

What you'll learn

Learning how to you matte painting effectively and efficiently can elevate your work to the next level. In this course, Matte Painting Basics and the Static Camera Shot, you will begin by gaining a solid understanding of foundational techniques by learning about resolution, static grain, distorted plates, bit depth, and software settings. Next, you'll learn how matte paintings should be organized, what painting techniques will break your shot, and even small details like how to name your files and layers. Once you understand how to properly setup and build your file, you will learn how to match your plates perspective, and alter the perspective of some architecture to fit into your shot. During the blocking phase you'll also learn how to build your own personal reference library, and then how to extract and clean up your painting after you've finished blocking. You will then take your painting from photoshop to nuke to composite and add life and movement to your static shot. Finally, you'll learn a bit about how matte painting fits into a vfx pipeline, how to hand off your shots to another artist or department, and the process of revision in the visual effects world. By the end of this course, you'll have a beautiful shot and be more confident in setting up your own static matte paintings. Software required: Photoshop-CC-2015.5, NukeX-10.5v2.

About the author

A senior matte painter with over 11 years of feature film experience, Heather has worked at several top studios like Disney Animation, Matte World Digital, and Rhythm & Hues. You may recognize some of her feature film work from Big Hero 6, Life of Pi, Avatar and Golden Compass. With a passion for training and educating the next generation of artists (and co-workers), she has taught at universities, developed training material for top studios and created online courses for CGSociety and Pluralsig... more

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