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.