Basics of Matte painting with Photoshop, Maya and Nuke

[Music] hello everyone and welcome back to the yellow dog 3d tips blog my name is Joe dot and I work for glued films in Manchester today we're gonna be having a look at some of the basic principles behind mutt painting we're gonna be creating something that looks a little bit like this it's a little breakdown to show you the layers which go into it and the 3d geometry we're gonna be projecting onto so there's the final shot so so today we're gonna be using a combination of software Photoshop to layer all the images up and create the composition we're going to be using Mayer to create geometry which the images are going to be projected onto and then everything's gonna be tied up together in Nuuk so here are the images which I've sourced from Google we've got sky we've got a four Gellerman we've got various mountains and a nice foreground element to add a bit of depth and main mountain which we're going to be projecting I'll supply all these images in a zip file so I'm just creating a 4k project file in Photoshop that's 3/8 40 by to 160 when you're putting together your map painting you're gonna want to layer it from back to front so you don't want to start with the sky and then the background mountains but really it's all about planning your composition before you jump into it I'm gonna be creating a composition which I have created before so it's all we've worked out so I'm just going to drag in one of my mountains I'll just roughly position it where I think looks okay so there we go you can use whatever method you want to cut out your image in this case I'm gonna use the pen tool that's just because it can it usually gives you a really nice edge you can fix any problems that you made previously so yeah here we go you're just gonna zoom in a little bit oh I need to Ruster eyes the layer as well before I can really edit it because I dragged it in there's a smart object so rasterizing and just going on the edge with the Bezier curve trying to get it as close as possible I'm just gonna cut here and I'll come when I've cut around the whole think okay here we go I'm just gonna put the finishing touches on it once I've cut around it all just go around the outside of the borders to get a clean cut up a right click and make selection I'm not going to feather it here I'm just going to press ctrl J to do plat to a new layer I'll get the selection if I control click on the little image in the layers panel and go to select refine edge here's where I'm gonna add a little bit of smoothing and feathering just to clean up that edge this will obviously help the composition the better the edge the better everything is gonna work so now we've got the new selection we can press ctrl J again and that will do our new selection to a new layer so now we've got a nice tidy edge but obviously our sky looks totally wrong so I've just made the sky editable by rasterizing it I brought the levels panel on the sky by pressing ctrl L and I'm just matching the brightness of the sky to sort of a wintry look also as a general rule of thumb things further in the background of a map painting a slightly lighter less contrasty and also slightly less saturated so I've just brought the brightness up on the back mountain just to create the illusion that it's further away so I'm gonna start bringing in some more images and layering this up this image I found I think would be ideal for the really far away background mountains I'm just gonna roughly position this and in this case we've actually got a vet quite contrasted edge around the mountain on the sky so I'm just gonna use the quick selection tool there this is a really really rough and inaccurate way of cutting something out but in this case I think it'll be okay and I'm just gonna press alt and click just to bring some of the edge detail back it looks like it actually works pretty well I forgot to rasterize the layer to make it editable and I'll just delete in that sky and see there's a little bit residual information left behind so I'm just going to delete that off just using a quick selection here I'm gonna ctrl click again and refine the edge bring the smooth and feather up and obviously you can see it's not - not too badly just gonna press ctrl J to duplicate that selection to a new layer move that behind our previous mountain and the further away things are the more faded they become due to sort of atmospheric gases is actually called atmospheric perspective if you want to Google that but I'm just bringing the levels up on that I'm gonna press ctrl U and also bring the saturation panel up and just desaturate it a little bit just doing this all by eye it's not really a science at this stage it's gonna brighten it up a little bit make it look a little bit more faded and it seems to look okay to me at the moment so using the exact same processes we've just been through I've gone through and layered more things up I've added fog elements between every few layers and here's the fog element I'll supply this as well it doesn't have any transparency so I've just put it as a 45 percent transparency in Photoshop which seemed to sort of look the best so I'll just go through the rest of the layers now yep laying them up here's a few more foreground layers under the fog layer and here's the main mounting that we're going to be building geometry for fog layer and is our foreground element that it's just cropped out from here it can be quite tricky to crop out because of all the leaves and things like that but you don't have to be too accurate with the crop on that because it'll have depth of field and motion blur on it as well so we do actually need to start saving out all of these layers are separate files so just create a new folder got elements where you need and every one of them has got to be saved out with transparency so I like to use a tiff file and just make sure the save transparency checkbox is ticked we have no compression also and just go through and do this for every layer making sure only that layer ticked on TIF files make sure you label them appropriately otherwise it will become very difficult later on so I'm just going to skip forward I would say make sure you say about a main comp just whip the whole thing in for reference later on it's really going to help you out so here are my final elements everything's cut out everything's got its correct transparency I also didn't bother saving up the fog element three times because we can just comp this in a Nuke later and add that transparency you later on so I've just jumped over to mayor and I'm creating a new scene you can actually use any 3d program to do this really it's just a matter of preference so the first thing I'm going to do is create a new camera and look through that camera and just set up the grid sort of like this and I'm gonna set up an image plane now or a background if you're using cinema 4d and I'm just gonna browse through to that main comp that we just saved up so here we go set that up now and now we're just roughly aligning the ground plane to where you would imagine it would be this doesn't have to be 100% accurate it's just to help us when we're adding objects into the scene so that's looking okay to me now and I'm gonna start by creating a cube this cube is gonna represent our main foreground mounting just positioning it really roughly it doesn't really matter about the perspective or scale of it at the moment because we're gonna jump back into our camera view now and start to align it very roughly so I've just rotated the cube I'm just matching the edges of it with the mountain so looking at the shaded view we can see it's coming along it's quite hard to imagine what's gonna go on at the moment so I'm just going to extrude these edges down and I'm just matching that to the far end of the mountain as you can see the alignment we can just carry on like this so on and so forth I'm gonna rotate and move this so much the open most rich of the mountain as you can see and I'm gonna grab this fudge and match it to the contours of the mountain the overall aim is just to get a rough piece of geometry which just roughly matches the shape of the mountain so you can achieve this in any way you want I usually find that just starting out with a box primitive and extruding the faces like this works the best for me but obviously you can use any method that you're the most familiar with so yeah just working on the geometry shaping it as best as I can I'm just going to select these front faces and start to build the perspective towards the camera so so obviously getting quite hard to see what I'm doing here should go to the perspective mode pull our geometry in a little bit you will start to realize that it gets quite difficult to see what you're doing if you're working between the camera view in the perspective view you start to run out of space so as soon as that starts happening I usually go to a split view so I'll have my perspective view on one side on my camera view on the other so yep just shaping that top rich I'm going to go to title save just so that I can zoom out a little bit to see what I'm doing a bit easier well I'm just matching the top piece of geometry to the top Ridge of the mountain and it doesn't have to be perfect like I said earlier and it can really be extremely rough because all that we really need is a rough shape to project our images onto so I'm just going to go to the split view now it's getting too difficult to see what I'm doing this one can be my camera this one can be perspective yep so no it's much easier to see what I'm doing I can just shape that geometry I'm just gonna speed this process up a little bit just for the sake of the video we're just carrying on the exact same way which I've just explained extruding faces and shaping it roughly to the shape of the mountain at this point we're only just building in the front mountain geometry we can work on all the other ones separately the ones in the background don't really have to be 3d objects they can just be planes or cards inside of nuke because you're really notice any perspective difference on them so here is the final piece of geometry that we're gonna be using for the front mountain it just only has to roughly match the contours of the mountain you also don't really have to worry about the edges overlapping the mountain slightly because new projects out all of our images with transparency so it takes care of the edges for us really something I forgot to mention earlier it was that it's very important to make sure that you've locked your camera off in terms of the attributes everything that should be locked as soon as you've set it up because if this moves you'll find it pretty much impossible to put it back to the same point so just make sure you look off your projection camera as soon as you set it up so I was carried on in exactly the same way creating geometry for all the different mountains except for the very far away ones which don't really require it I've not created any for the foreground element either because I figured it was going to be covered in motion blur and depth of field so I mean you could add it if you wanted to put in this case I'm not going to so that's what it looks like in perspective view looks a bit nothing he looks like a bit of a mess but as long as everything aligns roughly with the images you should be fine something I did when I was modeling some of the background mountains was I set up the image plane as the corresponding mountain I just found this was way easier to do obviously you can see the edge doesn't actually align properly but Nick will project out that transparency and it will look pretty much perfect so I find that just makes it a little bit easier to see what you're doing instead of trying to model it from the main comp so now we need to export our camera and a piece of geometry into nuke to do that I'm just gonna open the outliner it's a good idea to label your geometry just because obviously if you've got a more complex scene than this it will make it much easier to keep track of where you're up to so I'll just label that one main Mountain but in this case it's not really vital because we've only got two pieces of geometry on the camera so I'm going to select that geometry and go to export selection and a file format which nuke will read perfectly is the FBX format however it cannot just be a plain FBX you have to go down to the F ix file format options make sure the type is set to binary and the version is set to FBX 2010 I found this format works perfectly I think it might be the only type of FBX that you can read perfectly you can export everything from your scene as that including your camera so I'm just going to go through and do that for everything so just jumping over to nuke now once I've saved out everything and what we need to do is bring in a camera note straight off and go to file read from file in the node properties and select the geometry well the camera FBX file that we just exported as you can see now we have a camera in the scene that is in the exact same position as the mayor camera we need to read geo notes and this is going to bring in our geometry we can select our FBX files for each piece of geometry I'm just going to copy that path so that I don't have a tight fit again as you can see that's perfectly aligned I'm gonna get a new regio node paste it in just change this to main mountain just for speed so there we go I've got both of my pieces of geometry in I've got my camera perfectly aligned we're now ready to start projecting out our images so I'll just neaten up these nodes a little bit I'm gonna bring in a scene node you obviously need one of these every time you're working with 3d and nuke and just plug in the outputs from our existing nodes into the scene node I'm going to add a scanline renderer ode so we can actually get image of our 3d scene so you plug the camera tab into the camera obviously the scene into the scene and now we can look through this and you don't see anything and that's because we have no images being projected onto them and something I should have mentioned earlier and I should have done astray the beginning was so our working scale so we're working at 4k so I'm just going to set up a new template which is 3/8 40 by to 160 so this is obviously the scale of all our images and it's a 16:9 format but just need to label that quickly think yeah there we go so I'm just gonna neaten up my workspace a little bit make it a little bit easier to work with obviously we've got some crossed over node cables here I find easy just to separate them off by pressing ctrl add in these dividers just makes it a lot easier to see what you're looking at so to start projecting our geometry we're going to need these project 3d nodes you plug the camera tab into the camera I'm just going to duplicate that plug this one into the camera as well and now we can plug our image tab coming from our regio straight into this project 3d and this is gonna mean that the image which is being textured onto that geometry is going to be a projection from our camera so I'll just drag in our first piece which is the main mountain and I'm gonna drag in the other corresponding image to the geometry which I've modeled I'll just give you a preview of what they look like through just the viewer so now I can plug the corresponding image into the corresponding projects 3d node so there's one there's the other and if we press the tab and look through our 3d mode you'll see something pretty clever happened it's projecting out those images straight onto the geometry you can see it's taking care of the edges perfectly we're not gonna have to worry about that and this is exactly what we wanted to happen and these two mountains are going to be the sort of foundations of our whole I'm not painting so as you can see I've just dragged in the rest of the elements which we cut out in Photoshop into here and I'm just aligning them I'm just going to copy these project 3d nodes let's copy and paste in them one underneath each element plug the camera in for each of them just doing that really roughly now we can always kneel up things afterwards once we've got that we can plug in the image for each of them there's no geometry underneath each of these because the only geometry we're going to use is a basic piece of nuke geometry so for the sky I always use a sphere that's just because I think it sort of makes sense if you've got a moving camera you're not gonna want that flat sky skies are obviously spherical so I've got my sphere in but it's obviously far too small so just using the scale options in the node attributes we can start to scale that up far too small still as you can see though the projection is working so I'll stick that up ten times what just had it which is 100 the skies in the correct place now maybe it's a bit too small we can fix that later though once we've got the rest of the projections in so I'm gonna start adding in a card for each of the other elements this is a really far away but ground Mountain this can just be projected onto a simple card you doubt anyone would ever notice that this is just flat this seems to be the way that it's done in a lot of productions there's no point in wasting time modeling things that you would never notice I have no perspective on them so I'm just gonna scale this card up and position it right at the back it needs to be the farthest away not as far away as this guy though obviously so this is looking okay now in fact sorry it's not quite the back put that just looking at things this guy definitely needs to be scaled up a lot more because it wouldn't be that close to the mountain so I'm just gonna plug my image into that card as you can see it's actually starting to project that image onto it with transparency so there's no need to worry about how large that card is it's only good you're only gonna see the parts of it with the image on because of the Alpha Channel we saved help with the TIFF file so now I'm just going to copy and paste that card for all the different elements it's fine to do this because you won't see the surplus edges of the card because of the transparency we can just reposition these cards in 3d space so just just eyeballing the distances of what you think might be right so as you can see there's Mountain which is slightly closer to us I'll show you that through the renderer that's working really well I'm just going to do the same for each of the other elements look I just accidentally dragged in the main comp image we saved out of Photoshop but Nori's will just delete that out here's the foreground element so I'm just going for in this foreground card by double-clicking it bringing up the transform handles taking it right close to the camera in front of everything so this is just the foreground tree just to add a little bit of depth that's looking okay to me I'm gonna plug the image into it plug it into the scene as you can see there we go we've got every element we need it's just time to add in some foggy elements now so here is my fog element and I'm just going to drag it straight in copy and paste that project 3d node plug-in to the card image into image and finally bring a card in by copying a paste in it I'm gonna just position the fog well I think would be appropriate I'm sort of cheating and just using the same for government three times so I just can get three cards and plug the same image into it a professional map paint in you would obviously add a lot more of dynamic detail than this this is just for demonstration purposes so just position in these cards where I think the fog should be moving them back in 3d space so now I can plug in our fog elements into these cards just like so and then each card goes into the scene node and the problem here is that we don't have any transparency on this fog image so I'm just looking at that in 3d you're gonna be obscuring the back images so to add some blending options we can just put on merge straight after our fog element and bring the mix down to a suitable value again it's just a case of seeing what looks right in your scene you can see that there is transparency now and there are quite like a subtle amount of fog something that don't know it's too obviously but it's definitely there things that sell the effect of I'm not painting a lot are dynamic elements or maybe a video element of some fog things like that just really sell the effect so now we need to make an animated camera and we can do that by first unplugging projection camera from the scene we don't want to change this that's all and we can just duplicate that by copying pasting it and we're gonna spike that into the scene instead of the original camera we can also plug our camera tab from our scanline renderer into my new camera and just to keep things neat we're gonna label the old camera projection camera and new camera is gonna be called animated camera or animation camera whichever you'd prefer it just makes it easier to see what we're doing one more in our node view so in the camera tab of our animated camera node we need to untick read from file and we can just go through and set a key I'm on the first frame for all the translate and rotate boxes I'm gonna go to the end frame now and I'm just going to slightly tweak all of these values just by highlighting one of the decimal points I'm just scrolling my mouse wheel so I'm just gonna speed this process up but basically I'm doing is putting the camera in a nice final position where it shows off some of the parallax of the shot some of the perspective and everything's framed quite nicely once you've set a key on all these boxes everything that's gonna automatically keyframe so you don't need to set another key and here's the camera move that I've just created you can see there's quite a lot perspective in the shot everything moves nicely I'll just switch to my 3d view and show you what's going on so we've really just got a slight animation on the camera it's just moving through all the different layers that we've created and it's a really nice effect like a lot of people might not even realize that that's not a video so once you've got the base of this and there's lots of additional effects that you can play with I like to add a little bit of motion blur after the scanline renderer just to sell the shot a little bit more oh I'm in proxy mode at the moments just so that things refresh a little bit first of all here you go that's the motion blur on and off just blurs the edge off nicely you won't really notice it in the background very much but it really helps on the foreground elements just before I render out I'm just gonna up the shutter samples to 15 it just gives you a nicer blur it will take longer to render like this but it does look a lot better so now we can just write out our final image sequence so I'm just going to navigate to a suitable folder it's time to just name our image sequence so I'm just going to call mine map painting dots hash hash hash hash which is the frame padding which tells it's going to be an image sequence dot TGA I'm going to change the compression to none and click the render and that's not going to work because I'm in proxy mode just turn that off and I'll just pause it calculating that frame because I know it's right and I'll click render again and that will work and there we have it that's the end of this tutorial that's all there is to it really obviously we've just done a very basic example but we've covered a lot of the key techniques which you're gonna need to create more advanced math paintings so here's the final thing again thanks for tuning in and there is going to be much more content in the future so stay tuned [Music]

Channel: YellowDog

Views: 79,316

Keywords: Matte painting, Nuke, Maya, 3D Tips, YellowDog

Id: 4uwHCrTagpQ

Length: 25min 17sec (1517 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 08 2018