Week 9 Compositing in NukeX

Matte Painting Study 

Week 7 Compositing in NukeX

This week I am importing my footage in NukeX. I started by opening my file and importing my images to Nuke. From here you can then created a camera and and your scene nodes. We will be working with projectors to project a ground plan to add our objects. To do this you must create a new camera , card node and a Projection3D node. You can link these all together into your scene node. You may have to change you camera angle and card node angle to get the proper projection for your ground plane. You can use the same technique for your other nodes for the proper look. When you have completed this task you then can add more Projection 3D Nodes with spheres or any shape you want. Here is the result I got..

You can add color correction nodes or anything else you would like to add. Here was my final node graph before I rendered out my PNG sequence. 

Week 8 New Matte Painting

Matte Painting Study 

Week 8 New Matte Painting 

This week I am starting a new matte painting. For this matte painting the programs I will be using will be Adobe Photoshop for editing of my photos, NukeX for the compositing of my elements and Adobe After effects for working with particles and adding lens flairs and fog.

To start off I went in Photoshop and used the same techniques I used during my earlier blog posts on the photos I wanted to use to make my scene. Here is the result of my images i edited in Photoshop.

Here was the final result of the images put together. Color correction was done to some of the images to match the colors. The clouds need more work done and I plane to change out he clouds.

Week 7 Importing to After Efects

Matte Painting Study 

Week 7 Importing to After Effects

This week is fairly easy week. I started by opening up after effects. Then go to file and click import. Find you Adobe Photoshop File. Nice thing about adobe After Effects is that you can open photo shop files. When opening you Photoshop File chose open as composition. Also make sure the tab "Merge layer styles into footage" has been  check off. This is the easiest way if you have properly used folders and naming convention in Photoshop.

Re-size you composition to any size you want. Changing you composition is in the composition settings tab. You can access this by right clicking your comp and choosing composition settings. I chose to make my comp 1920 by 1080(HD) . Take you imported footage and drag it to the time line. Select all the layers and press "S" on the keyboard. Resize you layer to fix the comp or your desire.  Next step is to create a 3D Camera and select all your layers to be 3D layers.



From this point you want to move you background in Z space. Move it a far distance back. Do this with all your layers until you reach your top layer. You want to make a depth of field with your layers. This is for when you animate your camera it will look more realistic.

Now time to set camera position for your camera move. Go to the first frame and set your transform position. Then go later down the timeline to where you want it to stop.

This is the end result I got from my matte painting 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eZcp7lmmCZA&feature=youtu.be

To incorporate moving water or waterfalls you can use the brush to with an lowered opacity and flow and partially erase the photo so a video layer below can be seen. This works great with waterfalls and water effects.

Week 6 Color Correcting, Adding Light & Depth (Matte Painting Study)

Matte Painting Study 

Week 6 Color Correcting, Adding Light & Depth

Color correcting is something that takes time to learn some people grasp it easily sometimes it takes longer for others. This requires having a good eye of on color.We want to color correct are piece well so that it blends with the other pieces. When I color correct i manly use the tool Curves. Curves can be difficult to learn and hard to understand. But when you get the hang of it I would advise using Curves. You can also use Hue/Saturation , Exposure and Color balance. These tools are pretty self enplaning and simple to use. Here is a photo sequence of me using the following steps. 

I save a PNG of Each step to my color correction. Its very hard to tell by looking at the two photos but there is a difference that you can tell when you toggle on and off the layers.

Here is were i start to add fog. This will create depth in your photo. I started at the furthest mountain and worked my way back. For the fog i added an new layer above the background and covered it with white. I then used the eraser tool and erased the parts i didn't want. Use the Opacity on your brush and on your layer to help get the effect you are looking for.

You can also add light rays using the same method!

This is the final result :) 

Week 5 Editing & Arranging

Matte Painting Study 

Week 5 Extracting  Editing & Arranging

This week we are going to arrange our photos to see what works and what doesn't work. Here is the result of what we had at the end of last weeks blog. I'm not liking the end result of the photo so we are going to change up the design of the photo. I find the side mountains don't work I want incorporate my original photos. I decided to make it a environment scene and change the focus from what I originally wanted a cavern to a  more open concept. 

Here I found a mountain photo that matched the lighting in my rock photo. Deleted the old BG and placed this one in it. Used the same step as in my previous blog.

 I also found another snowy tree photo that I am using to go with my mountain and trees I currently have in the matte painting.

Moved the close trees changed the scale  and added a slight color correcting to tone down the blues.

Duplicating this image and moved it over to fill the entire page. Also changing scales and erasing some areas for less repetitive photo.

Here I removed the tree and  kept the rock.

Here is the final result at the end of this weeks blog. 

Thank you for checking out this weeks blog. Please check back next week for part 6.

Week 4 Extracting Clouds & Combining The Extracted Photos

Matte Painting Study 

Week 4 Extracting Clouds & Combining The Extracted Photos

Here in this blog I used the polygon lasso tool to erase the sky from from the mountains. I used this technique for all my photos of mountains. This is the results I got.

For the trees I used the lasso tool to get the back ground. But for the details I used the eraser tool and zoomed in on the tree's and got ride of the background in more details. Try using the opacity on the eraser for some spots and in other spot use the the feathers eraser tool. Don't worry to much on detail on trees in the distance as most details wont be seen. 

The photos I took I spent a few hours cutting out the detail in the trees. But the effect didn't look right because of the trees being still and not moving. Also for the change in color and snow on the trees in the background. 

I decided to cut out the trees and not use them in my final piece.

I did the same thing for the broken tree and used the eraser tool on the snow to blend it in to the snow on lower layers.

Here is the end result i got from my photos.