Sketch Of The Day | 21 08 2012

This time it's Photoshop - 1.5h . Random photo from the net. No color sampling used, painted just from the reference.

Sketch Of The Day

So I just came across this book called "Eat That Frog". I highly recommend it for finding great way to manage your time and hopefully changing your life! Simple but very effective ideas.
One of the main points in building your future is producing a list of tasks that will help to reach your goals and dreams. Without sharing my dreams with you ( yet :) ) I decided to do one digital sketch ( speed painting ) per day of environment or something that appeal to me and serves as good painting exercise.

Here we go then, first painting of a photograph by James Neeley ( great landscape photographer in my opinion ) . Let's see for how long I will keep doing those  - painted in Art Rage in 1.5h including small final tweaks in PS.

Sky Fortress

Environment concept for Gnomon Workshop image contest. The idea is no surprise after watching Avatar. Hovering mountain formations that can be a great protection from above, Fortress of Medth inhabitants suffer from constant lack of drinking water and ground to walk on. Armed to the teeth never been conquered...

Concept painting made in Photoshop with use of some textures and basic 3d model for perspective guidance. I started with finding an interesting sky seen from above the first layer of clouds. I then extended it by painting missing parts and came up with basic sketch/composition. This was developed to the form you see here through 3d modeling and painting over it. Pretty basic right now and would need much more detailing for high resolution modeling but the idea is delivered... I think :) Is it really a fortress?  hmmm, rather not - Sky city maybe...

Matte Painting Showreel 2012

It is finally done. This is my first showreel and now I do understand how much work does it take to actually create one of those. Paintings you see here have been created over period of one year since I decided that this is what I want to do from now on. There is still lot to learn but I do enjoy it immensely. The showreel was primarily produced in Adobe Photoshop, After Effects and Premiere. 3d parts were modeled and rendered in 3d Studio Max using VRay rendering plugin. Projections were created in 3d Studio Max. I hope you will enjoy watching it and please leave any comments or questions you might have. Thanks for checking out.

Matte Painting Showreel 2012 on Vimeo

Raz Media matte painting

Sharing with you my latest matte painting for Raz Media in Perth/Australia. Music video by western Australian band Origin to their track "Something Stronger" takes place on deserted,unknown planet with rigid, volcanic and uninviting landscape. The foreground will be part of the footage shot in the green screen studio. The 3d digital model will extend the set and the matte painting will fill the far background as well as the sky. I will post final video here once it's finished and posted online by Raz Media. What you see here is in 90% photographs with some mountains in the far background rendered in Vue xStream 10. Combined in PS CS5.5

Temple of Kong matte painting competition results

The CG Channel's March King Kong competition has come to an end and the results were announced yesterday.
I made the second place this time which is great! Congratulations Bobby and Gene! Great paintings this time around.

Results thread:
http://forums.cgchannel.com/showthread.php?p=21317&posted=1#post21317

Temple of Kong - Final matte painting

Here is finished " Temple of Kong" matte painting for the CG Channel competition. You can find the sketch for this competition in one of the previous posts. The plan was to include ZBrush sculpt in the foreground but unfortunately I ran out of time. I might do projection in the future and post it here so come back sometime. The WIP thread that shows few steps of the process can be viewed here :
http://forums.cgchannel.com/showthread.php?t=14732

I have created basic 3d model in 3d Max. I matched the perspective and rendered fairly simple RGB pass and textured it in Photoshop. I used 3d trees in order to achieve maximum lighting accuracy, they are not hyper realistic but will have to do for now. Waterfalls come from various photos as well as the horizon line image.

If you would like to check out animation of this painting with waterfalls in motion and small foreground parallax please check out my reel at around 1min :


https://vimeo.com/45778958