Still ain’t no Ellenshaw . . .

. . . but this will have to do and should suffice for LVJ.  So after a few days of painting the image up with detail and lighting effects in Photoshop, it’s ready for comping in with some of the live action shot against bluescreen.

The matte painting is one of a few that feature in the ‘hanger shootout sequence’ as backgrounds to the live action foreground.  There’s about 90 shots in the sequence and this background is used in about 50% of them.

Here’s a couple of stills from two of the shots from the sequence and a version of the matte painting.

I ain’t no Peter Ellenshaw. . .

Come to think of it, neither am I a Harrison Ellenshaw, Michael Pengrazio, Chris Evans, Craig Barron or even Chesley Bonestell.  The next shot after hso_020 is a reverse angle that reveals the large interior of the hanger on board an alien space craft and there was a time when I was going to be texturing every fine detail of the model, but then I wised up and thought I’d treat the shots as if they were digital matte painting shots.

Initially, I thought I’d take the model and throw a basic, mid grey material all over it.  Then light it and render it with all the usual techniques and use this as the basis of the matte painting, it’s a similar technique that they used on ‘Final Fantasy’, but, like I said at the top, my matte painting skills fall short and need as much of a helping hand as I can give them.

So what I did, was make a bunch of textures that were kind of generic in nature that could be mix and matched across the hanger model and that would at least give me more variety in tones across the render.  It also meant I wasn’t starting with a blank canvas and could concentrate on adding detail and life to the painting rather making sure my perspective was bang on.

A couple of other passes that I’ll spit out of the render process will be a depth pass so I can control depth of field and colour correction into the background and like the corridor shot before it, there’ll be a low level fogging.

hso_020_F_n_V_entrance_final

The hanger entrance shot has been completed and although the last blog post which talked about the commencement of the shot was dated December 2008, the work rate isn’t as embarrassing as it looks, what with other work commitments always part of the juggling act.

The corridor went through further stages of detailing and texturing since the last post and then a render which included ‘final gathering’ out of 3DSMax went into Photoshop where even more detailing was added as a matte painting.  This became the background for the shot which had a thick layering of fog added in the comp along with some light glows courtesy of ‘Knoll Light Factory’.

Then we needed some heavy duty blast doors that opened to reveal the corridor.  I was definitely aiming for something that had a chunky mechanism of some kind, so after trawling through some reference, I came up with an idea, sketched it on paper, then modeled and textured it in 3DSMax and Modo.  Some really basic rigging was used so that the door could do it’s thing, just parenting one object to another.

The Hanger is very low lit so the lighting was low key with only a couple of sources above left and right that dropped a wide diffused pool of light onto the door.  All rendered in 3DSMax using Mental Ray with Final Gathering, a single pass pretty much, just dropping the same render on top of itself with some expanding of values and blurring just to get some glows on the lights.

We recently got access to an extremely cool plugin for 3DSMax called Fumefx that does some awesome looking fluid dynamics effects, great for smoke and fire, so we couldn’t help ourselves and added some steam and smoke emanating from the mechanism as the door opens.

One of the next shots on the list is the reverse angle on this one that reveals the hanger.  This will involve similar techniques although the plan is to do no texturing on the actual model itself and do all colouring as a matte painting which can serve as the basis for all the shots that follow looking in the same direction.