Digital Matte Painting - Using Photoshop Module 1

okay welcome to this training course in matte painting now I'm not a matte painter but I know the principles so hopefully this this training series will help you this is a piece of put together so I've added loads and loads of elements to put this as a shop which I'm going to use in a video that I'm doing all right animation I'm doing of a dragon kind of racing through here so I wanted this as a kind of map painting for it these birds I'll probably take out or animate in some way make them scatter when the dragon comes into shop so this is what I've put together and we are going to do something similar so the first thing and the most important thing is make sure you've got access to lots of images and that they're yours unless you're just going to show this privately and then you can use copyrighted but obviously if you're not then make sure that you're using all your own images so I have a library in my pictures folder well I have lots of images and these are all images I've taken or that I've got or royalty-free so I can use I can tap into these resources and use them in my matte paintings so that's the first thing right the next thing is set up a canvas and the size of the matte painting I've got here is quite big it's a 1920 by 1080 so it's a big old painting for HD and a 180 HD so that's the size that we'll be working at so 1920 by 1080 so let's start by opening your Photoshop I'll just close this file down and we'll go to file new would type 1920 by 1080 and this is our canvas so we're ready to work so the first thing I'm going to do is just to set up a folder structure so on my desktop I've got a dragon's world folder where I'll be storing my map painting okay so let's just save it in there I'm going to label this concept one I might work different stages as I work through it but this is the first step right okay so we're going to go and do it roughly the same as that last picture that you saw so I'm going to go into my my image folder here and I'm gonna grab a nice seascape that I've got going on and I'm simply gonna use the Move tool over here drag it inside of this now that I need this anymore I'm going to close this down I'm going to press ctrl - to extend out I'm just going to maximize this screen I'm going to take out edit and then free transform and basically put this where you want it to be and I'd like to point out this stage I'm leaving a little bit around the outside and that is because I want a pan shop so I want to work outside this this area so that's another thing I'm going to make sure that I do a clip border for it so I'm going to go to up here shift control in for a new layer I'm then going to fill that layer we have any old color I'm going to come back to image size or sorry canvas size and I'm going to extend this out a little bit more so I'm going to take this to about 300 this weighs 1,300 by 2,000 might be a bit big I'm just going to extend upwards and outwards that's probably a bit bigger so I'm going to come in a bit I don't want a massive pan I'm just gonna chop a little bit at the top off okay so now I'm going to select around here and I press control shift by and I'm going to delete and force control shift by to get my selection back and I'm going to drop this in here this will show me the size of my actual plate and the outside will be overspill that I've got so I'm going to now take this I'm going to use the free transform tool I'm going to just drag this out and there we go so the first thing I thing well let's set a sort of color mood for this but I'm going to do it when I put the other background in so I'm going to go in and grab my landscapes folder again and look for a nice background to this I want to kinda cloudy background I have quite a lot of cloudy shots this one's got quite a lot of moved in it as well which are quite liked so I think I'm gonna use that at least I'll use that for the cloud that's too nice it's not bad Oh I combined them right I'm gonna open up because it's nice and done it's got a lot of atmosphere this one and again I'm going to drag this into here close this one down maximize this now I'm gonna turn this layer off because I want to strike off horizon line and come back in there then it will show me where I can go up to on my horizon that's not bad okay that's good okay I'll just get rid of this I'm gonna go into my selection tool again make sure Federal's on 0 I'm gonna select across here that's not too bad and I'm gonna just delete that out and if I have to I just move my brought it down a little bit I'm gonna paint out this little glider guy here that's good very straight border there very straight to horizon line which I don't mind okay so I've got to really get these colors to kind of match up so I like this top one I like this top color I might change it a bit so I'm going to come to image adjust and I'm going to go down to my hue and saturation and I need to desaturate it quite a bit I probably need to lighten it maybe change the tone slightly that's bit better a bit more moody I'm going to come into my cloud layer and I'm going to do the same with this I want to move it towards the blue a bit more now I'm just gonna check my levels get to be a little bit off that's quite nice okay now they're quite heavy clout so I'm gonna want them reflecting in the water a little bit so I'm going to select this top layer I'm going to duplicate it I'm going to come up to edit and I'm going to go to transform and flip vertically now I'm going to use the lighten filter actually maybe overlay bit too much soft light bring this down a bit it's quite nice I've got a little bit of that going on then I'm just gonna trim off while I don't need which is that I've got a little bit of stuff going on down there which probably will get covered up but I'll just I'll just get rid of it using the clone brush okay so that's good it's just added a second level of kind of detail across it but you might notice doesn't really go fade back nicely so I'm gonna add another layer on top of this and I'm gonna use my gradient tool yeah that's not really working okay so I just add a bit of fog in there I think I never delete that layer okay I'll work that back in later right so am I happy with this kind of mountain range here no not really it's not really going to work with my painting so I'm going to look for something else that's quite nice gives it a nice depth so I'm going to select part of this now just you and I'm going to drag the selection into here and of course go through the free transform ctrl T to just put this drop this into where it should be have a look at it it's not too bad I'm gonna use the erasing tool here just start to make sure my opacity is up to 100 start to just go around it try not to touch those nice clouds I've got going on there and there we go okay so now what I want to do is to adjust my hue and saturation again just to try and get it a little bit more like what's going on that's pretty close okay so I'm happy with that background I'm happy with the water layer so I'm going to move this sky layer up it's a good idea to actually start labeling these at this point so I'm just going to label this pkg for background reflux for the reflection the skyline I'm gonna take this top light layer and I'm going to press ctrl D to merge it down to the skyline layer and now I can do any cleanup work that needs to be done so I can come in here you use the clone tool take some of this and begin to merge the two in so they work a little bit better together it's not too bad anyway so I'm happy with that okay so we've got my sky we've got the nice the nice background there like I said I want it kind of misty back here so to do that I could take some of this cloud as it's the same dragging into here what's going on use the Move tool to drag it into here I'll bring it up here and I'm going to create a mass for it so I'm gonna go to layer layer mask reveal all now I'm going to select all here control right press ctrl copy it ctrl C come back into here press alt and paste it into now I want to go to image and adjustment and threshold now and press alt back in here and it should have taken most of that out I'm just gonna fill this top area so let me just select this and fill this in that's a bit better it's just showing you a novel way of using the mask and making it work for you I'm gonna go to filter and I'm just going to Gaussian filter this now give me this kind of misty look so all I'm gonna do now is grab the Edit and blow this up somewhat start to put these in here I'm gonna use the black now for my masking so if I use black if I was clicked on this layer and I do you know use black I would just paint the color I've got 53 opacity that's why it's not showing as black oh I've got it on brown so that's what happened it would paint that layer but I want to take away a bit of this or feather this off a bit so I need to click on here and now if I've got back black selected in my paintbrush I will be able to wipe this away from some of the masks and thus get rid of that sharp edge that we've got going on so I'm running down there there's loads of ways of doing these kind of cloud effects this is just one I'll show you some more later using brushes so that's that so now I can just start to duplicate these layers and offset them a little bit zoom out so you see what's happening with kind of building up her a misty layer in front of it right so that's one way of doing it another way of doing it is to create a new layer go on to the lair with the skyline use the clone tool with the softest brush select a sample of the cloud come back onto the layer you just created and start to draw it in roughly where that line is if you need to go back on the skyline and reselect some cloud do that I'm doing that for this area that's good okay now I can just use the fill and bring the opacity of that down and of course delete any bits out that you don't want then I might want to use a filter and use a blur this use a Gaussian blur like this and that creates another kind of misted area coming here and just tone this down a bit it's nice to leave parts of the image sharp but it just needs something to break break the straightness away although like I said we will be putting things in front of it because she news multiply and darken that area down which can also look quite effective and in fact I'm gonna because I've got the skyline here I'm gonna do a duplicate layer and just bounce that into the water so I'm going to do a duplicate layer on the skyline I'm going to go to edit transform and flip vertically I'm going to tie that up with that I'm gonna take this and I'm going to drop the fill just a little bit crease this brush size and just wipe out most of it now the problem is that's reflecting too low so I need to go to free transform and just push it just a little bit more that's better so we got the clouds and now we got a bit of reflection and it's looking it's looking a lot better especially with that multiply layer over top so that's kind of our background done just labeling that so that's our skyline and our reflected surface so I'm going to group these in a layer now so I've selected them and I've gone down here and I've gone new group four layers and calling this background and now let's put them in there so that's all and I'm a little crop that's cropping nicely so right now we want to kind of add some a big sort of rock in here I'm just going to adjust this layer again just think it's a bit it's just a bit blue so I'm going to go to adjustments and hue and saturation just gonna bring that down a bit our light source is pretty coming from here to look where your light source is coming from in order to put the rest of the bits in so right I'm going to flick up my landscape again and what I'm looking for is I've got a nice rock formation I use for that other concept that's quite nice that's the one I'm thinking about that one there these were taken on the same day so I know the lighting was was pretty consistent right I think I'll drag this one him here we go so I'm gonna select the whole thing and just drag it straight into my my piece okay so that's in there so I could manually go around it cut it all out but I'm not I'm going to use I'm going to select tolerance on 32 and set select and I'm going to press similar and then I'm going to delete that out then I'm going to press select that with the magic wand and the game press similar and delete it out and now I'm just left with some garbage around here so I'm just gonna manually with the brush just select around and delete delete that out now we're going to integrate this as part the scene so let's have a look at it and first of all our colors are a bit off I'll just get rid of that as well yeah our colors are a bit off with it so the first thing I'm going to do is do a color correction I'm gonna go to adjustments hue and saturation again my old favorites and just bring that down a bit then I'm going to adjust the levels I'm just going to check these okay and finally I'm just gonna check the brightness and the contrast okay that'll do for now it definitely is too bright on these sites I'll be dulling those down but it's fine so now to drop this into the piece the first thing I'm going to do is do a duplicate of this latch hold that for the time being I want to select the smudge tool here bring it up in size a bit and just start to bring it down then I use the eraser just to erase that bit back out again and now I grab this one and I flip it actually yes I do so I go flip vertical this is pretty much the same as what we did before where we're just going to create the kind of reflection and I come to my fill and I bring it right down at this time I'm going to get the eraser and bring the size right down and make sure my opacity is down a little bit I'm just going to sort cut into it going with the kind of direction of the water and it's not exactly still so I might want to just use the smudge tool just to make it not so sharp obviously wear it the closer it gets to the rock the sharper it's going to be so that's pretty good and now I'm going to merge that down so kind of control e to merge that and we've got a bit of cleanup to do I'm just going to select that I'm going to go to layout down to matting and you remove white matte if fat that's caused the problem I'm going to go back up on the history so I'm not merging malaya and I'm gonna do my matting at this stage in fact I'll leave them under under flattened okay so you might need to go round this now you could try using this and then using the old similar but you might need to put your tolerance setting down to about two or something just because it will pick up listen lazy approach really should really go through it all so you're taking out any bits run around your model do model clean up model clean up paper sub painting painting clean up so just running around this turn this higher or was it be all day so I spend a bit of time going around it all making sure it's all tight and tidy and I'll see you in the next lesson where we all carry on adding more elements and in a bit of mood and stuff into the shop okay I've gone ahead and finished this map painting so this is what we're going to be working towards now if don't worry I'm going to cover all these techniques I just wanted to show you what the finished production would look like finish painting would look like so as you can see I've got my my crop there and that's it uncropped so it gives me a bit of movement to be able to move this scene around a bit and animate certain features like maybe the waterfalls and these foreground elements but I wanted to show you this end resulting file and all the bits I've done and recap on some of the techniques that we've used if if I went a bit too quick so here we go I've put a color tin over it to globally change and sort of bring it all together and as you can see all of my components are all in their own separate folders or groups and so it's nice and easy for me to find out find particular groups that are causing problems although I don't like and all of this is using techniques that we've already covered and coming up with this final output now there's one big thing that I did do and that was the background the light is coming in from this kind of left-hand direction and my sky scene had the light coming in from the right or that's how it looked so I basically just horizontally flipped the background and the reflected layer that we created as well and that seemed to work so I didn't have to change anything too dramatically so as you can see I've flipped it around and just flipped that okay so this is what we're working towards and now I want to show you some of the features or some of the techniques that we've already used just to make things crystal clear for these techniques and what I would say is that the brushes that you use play around with I'm not going to go into detail on all these different brushes that you can use but play around with these and you can get some good effects all these sort of default brushes that are in here ones that I use a lot of these sort of top section ones these ones here and sometimes I'll create my own or I might use a couple of these just play around and see which ones work for you that's brushes keyboard shortcuts so if I go to one of my soft brushes this is a 45 pixel brush you can see it on the screen if you look down at your keyboard next to the P on the keyboard there's two brackets if you tap the right-hand one you're going to get your brush size increase and if you tap the left one it will decrease so the bracket keys work those at the top here which I use a lot is the opacity slider and I'll continually be flicking the opacity down and there's a great way to do that keys one on the keyboard right the way to 0 will change the opacity so I can go to 60 I can go to 40 I can tap it again and it'll go up so that's a really quick way to get your capacity working I can do 77 there by clicking 77 or 45 34-0 takes it back up to 100 so that's something that you use all the time you've also got the e on the keyboard will activate the eraser so these are shortcuts that you'll be using all the time so I would learn these B or flick it back onto the paintbrush and their shortcuts for all of these all these little so just play around with the different shortcuts or the tools that you're using so that's that right okay now I have a look at what we talked about which was I'm going to quickly cover how to sell layer groups and also about the masking technique we used also going to dip in we've already looked at the hue/saturation mean it's pretty obvious and the levels we've looked at those or briefly cover those again but I'm going to open an image now and sort of show you all of it in in practice wanna find something that's girl that'll probably do okay so we got this one here now using the layer masking is a very non-destructive way of being able to mask out certain parts because by using the layer mask you can always pull that detail back remember layer mask if we're painting out detail we're going to use black if you want to put a detail back in a game we're using white because it works from a grayscale to work out the masking so the first thing I need to do on this flat layer is I need to make this a non background layer so I'll double click in there boom sorry and make that a marsala I can pull detail out so as we already saw we can use the magic wand turn up the tolerance settings to try to get as much of the masking as possible and then we could hit the backspace which kills off all of this I'm going to drop another layer so going up over here and they're going to get a new layer and I'm just gonna drop a black layer in and I'm just going to drag this layer below it you can see here there's white around these edges you can use once my layers got the Alpha which is this cut out bit you can use layer and matting and remove white matte and it will pull it in and you can do that a few times to just pull that in to get rid of that fringe it's a handy little tip if it's black you want to use the black map or you can go in and just globally defringe it and it'll ask you how much you can go in there and put six or something and it will just take six pixels off all the way around so that's a handy little tip too to speed up your workflow right so even though I've cut this out I can still use my layer masking all I need to do is going to the layer go to layer mask and reveal all and you'll see this will appear over here if you press the alt and then you click in here you'll get this come up I have my cap locks on be careful you haven't got your cap locks on so it'll cause problems now if I now just did black in here like this and then I hit the Alt key and I click there you're see it's cut that out but if I click here I can draw black on here but if I click this one you see that it changes I can then select the white switching my colors there paint that detail back in and you'll see that on the mask it's updated there so it's a non-destructive way of being able to mask out using black now and I'm not painting black on this model it's just bringing the background fruit it's offering it out if I click that you can see and you'll see the blacks appeared in there I can click into there and clean up and finish up there then go back in so that's layer masking and like I said it's non-destructive so I can bring detail back or make sure I'm in the right layer if I if I'm inside this layer I can paint white on here and that's paint it's not part of the mask so I wanna undo that and I want to make sure that I'm in that layer and then using the white I can bring this detail back so that's really handy to use a lot of people just use that I use a combination of both if I think I'm going to need to bring some of the detail back then I use this masking methods if not I'll probably snip out and clean up my components as I go along but whatever works for you so once you've got your masks all nicely sorted and you're not going to use it anymore you can apply it so if you right hand click on the layer just apply layer mask it will then apply it and you've no longer got a lamb a layer mask does stop you from doing certain things and using certain tools so bear that in mind so if you're going to have to so you might want to make a copy of it and then apply the layer master a while and keep that copy just in case you've got to go back to it so it's just been prepared for all eventualities right as we've already looked at if we go into image and then adjustments we can go into levels and we can play around with the highs and lows of the overall the overall image which gives us quite a lot of control but say for instance we just wanted to maybe knock up the green or something like that you can go into image and adjustments and yeah we could use hue and saturation but that's going to change the overall image so what we would use is curves and that's scary but it's not it works on the RGB channels so you've got red green and blue you can pick which channel you want or you can work on them all now if I wanted to know on this graph where the green was this particular green I could click here and it would map it and it would tell me that that green is at that point so I could lock certain parts and then be able to change just those areas without massively affecting the underlying so I've just so as you can see my greens getting really affected so this is really good for all you can go into individual channels just go into the green here but this will affect all of it again you can use this to find out where your green is along here and pull this up then I can pull this down pull this onto it the straighter straight a curve and see you're really affecting you're not really affecting other colors but you're just affecting the green modifying this green color so it gives you lots and lots of control play around with that that's um that's vital that you learn the young you understand the principles of this and as you see it begins you're actually being you've you've changed one of the one of the channels there it will actually show that channel here so that's the curves box which is used quite a lot especially when you want tweak certain parts and not to he covers of course we've already covered the hue and saturation which is quick fixes to things really saturate things up but also what I didn't show you was that you can do certain areas so say I masked off this area I could then go in and just adjust that area like that so you don't have to be affect the whole image you can just affect certain parts of it and here you've got the history brush so it'll take this back to what it was before which again is another good thing you might have over spilt on your masking and you might just want to use this to just come in here so that's it so that's really the main tools that I use for these type of map paintings and generally what we're doing is we're actually we're doing the concept Inge as a mapping but what you'll receive is a concept which in some ways makes it a little bit easier because you're following a guide rather than just making it up as you go along so that's some of the tools hopefully that's been of help to you and now we'll continue with our concept our map painting stroke concept okay see you in the next lesson okay welcome back right so we've done our cleanup of our model and we've talked a little bit about the methods being used so let's carry on without our map painting and the first thing I want to do is on an add different sort level to the top here before I do that I'm just going to make a duplicate copy of this which I'm going to free transform ctrl T but holding the shift' while I'm dragging this out and I'm just gonna put him kind of in the background he'll be about that far out there's something like that I'll just delete this access there now I'm gonna start labeling these really important you stop labeling them so this is the front rock reflection so name them something so that you know know what they are like this and this is my front rock I'm going to build up a lot of layers so it's really important that you label everything this will be our back rock of course we need to add reflections to that as well so actually I'll do that now I'll just duplicate the layer and do my usual flip vertical bring this down about here take the tint down coming to the eraser select soft brush for this I'm using soft brush with the opacity down to about 55 and I'm just gonna run across it like that then I'm going to use the smudge tool and I'm gonna start to smudge this shadow up a little bit and then finally I'm just gonna use the eraser just to take out a lot of this I don't want the reflection going too far up they might even take it down a little bit more it's a bit further away okay so that's those two I can turn those off now don't need those so we need a base or grounding for the top here I think this rock placement is a little bit off I want to kind of move it up maybe a little bit more that's probably fine and in fact I think I'm gonna use the eraser here just to just take a little bit more of this this away a bit and he could come along here just use the smudge tool just to smudge it out a little bit as it wouldn't be directly down there's water here so it would uh this little ripples so it would kind of get broken up so that's quite nice okay right so now I'm going to just go to my references again and I'm going to drag so you always have this open on and I always have it set up on dual monitor it's essential that you're using a graphics tablet you can't really do any sort of map painting with just the mouse it just doesn't work and the trees I want are going to be kind of windswept trees these were a nice texture I've got the image somewhere and I can find it but it's a nice texture was taken in New Zealand they've got these massive plains of green where the wind sweeps across and causes these trees going really funny shapes okay here it is right see these trees there really is quite nice before I go in I've got my tolerance at 32 I'm just going to scrub out most of the blue and I'm just going to drag this straight into here it's going to be huge I'm going to make a duplicate just close that one down I make a duplicate of this and just now I'm scaling this to get it approximately the right size and ratio for that for that rock in the background so it needs to come down it's quite far away that's not bad okay so I put it here now you can use the clone tool I can start cloning this I press the key to sample the sample here then I can go on to my rock layer or another layer in fact I'm going to create another layer above it new layer and swap rock detail and now I can because I've sampled there remember I went to there clicked alt click alt but I went into my new lair I'm gonna say where the start is gonna be which is about there and then I can sample it's like very carefully I'm putting that on the top and I'm going to come down here now if I can't sample here I've got to go back on that other layer because it won't take a sample from that now I can go back onto here and start to put these trees so I'm going over the top of the trees that are kind of there with these new ones I'm out of the sample area there so I need to come back in just take let's go down here I could put something around this side that sort of meeting up there there's that little bit sticking out there so I'm just gonna sample maybe this not like that I think I just removed this this little bit sticking out need to make sure I'm on the rock glad to be able to do that like that so there we go we've created a new top for that and what we do need to do now that's our top detail is select the brush come down in size for this I'm going to use I could use I could just use a soft brush for this but I think I'll pick 39 it's a bit more kind of rock pressing the Alt key over an area will select that color so if you look down here as I click it will select that color and what I want to do is just come along here and I'm going to drop the opacity down so I've got a little bit of the background still showing through and I'm just going to drop this drop this in here take a little bit of that out maybe jump into the clone brush clone a little bit of this over here just into that rock jump back to this cleanup so they will be able to clean up around here we jump back into my brush maybe sample maybe sample a little bit of the rock in to bring hearing so now kind of making a rich for this to sell and what you're trying to do is just kind of integrate it a bit better so it looks like so it looks like this sort of part of the rock there that some that will take that so that's not bad do a bit more tidying up I think around this area come in and just darken that down a bit but if I move up move out that's quite effective these need cleaning up so use some little trees to add those so you get the idea you just go in there and sample a bit of this come back down to the rock detailing and begin to put it in do make sure that you're using the right tools because I'm not you sort of fault them over the top I think I have some of these little trees coming out the other side as well so sample from here and I might bring these around it looks like it could work you got kind of rich running down that side I'm just gonna grab a bit of this just stop to fill it in I'm using the darker colour with it set to an opacity of about 40 just because some of these this light wouldn't be affecting this side because it is round the the far side of it so I want to just dull that down a little bit now I'm just gonna come in here and start to tidy up and you just kind of build on it we're trying to add little bits in here of light color just to pick it out because it was looking a bit dull so that's how that's done so you change that significantly from what it was before and the all kinds of works we haven't known we haven't done any blending in yet but we'll get to that now I'm going to leave my thing up there this layer I'm looking at the back rock now let me just move this down those back rocks really small so I'm going to take my little sample that I've got here and I'm gonna free transform this down so I can work with it there and in this instant rather than sample and jump back I'm just going to merge this layer onto the back rock layer so I can turn this one off I can turn the reflection off and all I'm gonna do is control e salt it down now it's on one layer it means I can sample directly from it so I'm going to go into the clone again and I can start to add my features but also I'm going to start cloning and changing the whole shape of this rock I've selected a point in there and I'm gonna start to bash around and create a brand-new rock structure probably need to do another reflection so I'm grabbing parts and just duplicating out to change the shape that's quite nice so that shapes been well and truly changed and you just gotta make sure just go over some of the areas because you want to make sure that you haven't got it's not not looked like it's been cloned this area in this area are a tenth of course I'm going to come in and just start to change you around a bit of course it was based off the front rock so you want to make sure it's a bit different mm-hmm okay so when you've done that I just want you to come in again and just start to clone a few of your trees across the top maybe for this one I'll put a nice bit of green around here and I'll put on here a nice bit of foliage going around and then we're going to dip into my brush just sample bear this off and just start to darken it around some of these areas so remember I've got 40 opacity here and I just sort of dunking it down and trying to blend it in and I'm coming back to the clown and putting certain it's a clone over the top and there we have it but something I saw pulled this one as well actually in put him back here so he's kind of coming around you got this wall here and then you've got this bit of greenness that's flowing over the top so if there was a wall there that would probably be a bit darker which is nice and they'd probably be a little bit of a shadow over there so I'll just hint that shadow just drop a bit more the bigger shadow in there that's nice okay that's good so I'm just gonna zoom out now I have a look at it and have a look how it matches up with the rest of my my map I was gonna put another what's gonna put a shadow in for that but I think I can maybe get away of it if I just use the I just use the blur tour actually no it's only gonna take me two seconds so what's the worry so okay so I've got this layout now what I need to do is just to come in here and delete the area that I don't want so I'm using the lassi to do that now I'm gonna do my duplication and my flipping and my reflection so there he is again drop him right down coming with the eraser or even I'm wrong about 50% that's good get me it's to here it's nice okay I'm just gonna use this much tool now just to on the rock layer just tubing this down a bit I want to sort of try and sink it into the into the picture a bit better I'm also gonna now flick to a white color mm-hmm I'm gonna use a soft brush your lower pasty of about 17 as we've got here and I'm just gonna start to just putting a few white maybe that's a bit low there's a few little white lines going around it that's a bit better so I'm just kind of trying to refine a few of these features in here that should be alright it's well back by settled it down a bit better so this is how we do it we just go along adding more and more bits and pieces and just concentrate add add another rock here like this one that I did have a look at the finished one you can see what you've got to kind of achieve don't worry about the waterfalls or the color balance or anything just put all your rocks in location in the background the mid-ground area just put everything in make sure if you think nicely matches up if there's light on the wrong side make sure that you flip it or that you tone it back and then light on the other side just concentrate on all of those until you get something like this without this foreground none of this foreground but all these background elements don't worry about the waterfalls or the mist in front or the color tint in just as I said get it so that you've got another big rock here and maybe one at the side however you're designing your map and then the next thing we look at is putting the foreground element in and then we'll look at color adjusting everything and final tweaking then we're sort of at the mist and the light rays into it and as I said before just before I go this light is hitting the wrong side the lights coming from here this is a big light source it needs to be over on the left so I'm going to go into my background color now I'm gonna take my skyline copy and I'm just going to flip it on the horizon so transform and there we go so that looks a lot better it looks like the lights hitting it at the right angle okay so I'll see you in the next lesson where you should have created all of these elements not color adjusted just added in bits and pieces and then we'll look at the adding some buildings into these a we'll look at adding the waterfall and then we or tackle the foreground element okay welcome back so you've probably put your blocks in there you can see that I've put the foreground in as well I haven't done any alterations I've just cut it out and just put it straight in there and you also probably know that there is a little bit different to that concept I showed you earlier yes I didn't want to repeat myself so I thought I'd come up with something a little bit different so that's the reason behind that so I haven't really made any major changes I've dropped that in there I've put this nice kind of effect down the side don't know where I'll keep it yet and I've dropped this major rock in here which is the only difference I need to color correct this so I'm going to select it and this is the left rock so I'm going to rename this this layer this was the original size I left it in there because I quite liked it I'm not going to use it though but some I just leave it in there anyway and you can do that with your files you can leave them in an actual size and you can use those for sorts just in case you've got to come back and and redo something or change something you've always got your source files in there so let's go to this rock that we've got and let's go to image and levels and I want to lighten it a bit because it's a bit further away so I've lighten the mid range there I'm also going to go down to my hue and saturation I'm just gonna take I'm going to just desaturate it a little bit as well that looks nicer obviously there's a bit of tidy up to do around the edge so I come in here with the small brush and just start to clean this up I'm not going to go and clean up all the bits it's just gonna I can just do that at the end and you want to go round just using the spacebar as I hand tall you can grab and move around the canvas press and hold the spacebar and just move it and what you want to do is just go round it all just get rid of that fringe there again you could use the defringe to do this and if you want you can add extra foliage using the clone brush grabbing a sample of something put it in there but now it's matching a bit better but cuz this one now will no longer kind of match this one so we got to go to our back rock which is this one and we've got to just change a few of the bits on the here as well it's a bit colorful so I need to just knock that down using the saturation just desaturate it somewhat and we'll be pretty missed in there as well so it's not it's actually a bit sharper than than the other one check it back a bit but I'm gonna go to light because I want to keep the nice dark on this side so what I can do in this case is I can duplicate this rock I can grab my lasso tool and this will allow me to control where it's going to be lighter all the way it's going to be darker I'm just going to select that I'm going to inverse it I'm going to delete it and now I've got control over this part of the face so I can come in and not the levels up and just have a bit more control on it and at the end of that I can then just do control e to merge this down into the rock so we got it back again and this front rock is actually a little bit too too dark sand will come in here and just lighten him up a little bit this Bachrach sir I'm switching back again I am actually going to apply a slight Gaussian blur to this because it's too sharp I'll probably be another point five something like that there's also another tool in Windows you can go to history and history allows you to go back through do you multiple undos so I'm just going to show you the effect of this Gaussian blur on this as you can see it's just nipped it back and you might have noticed in the background there I've got a little a little mountain a little a little island that was added not sure it works I'm not sure that works it's a slight hint of something going on back there we have to be quite careful with these that it can take away from the but should look better now if I come at your size yeah it sort of fits in a bit better now and this rock here the more I'm looking at it I'm thinking it should be a bit sharper so I'm gonna go into filter and use a sharpen I'm gonna use the unsharp mask massively sharper but so I think I'm gonna have some features in here I have some of this green and I'll take this green down I've just lying down a little bit bringing it more towards the blue okay that's good I can't just let duplicate this layer and bring it down here I just want to see how things would kind of work yeah that'll look quite nice there I'm going to put that there bring up my brush size kill off these areas and voila an instant piece of foliage add it to that area so it's looking quite nice I see I've also put sort of like I just dragged in a kind of front of a wave and put it in there to see how it look I quite like it but um I decided not to use it in the end so it's basically this picture here something like this and I just cut a piece out of it feathered the top so you know like feathering with this if I select the rectangular tool or the lasso tool up here you've got a feather so if I have it zero and I cut something out let's just let's just do on this if I go around here with a zero and I cut it out it's nice and sharp but if I set the favourite something like 50 and now I did it sharper it's softer so that's the feather for you which you'll use a lot of but yeah I'm kind of happy with this from bit and you see I added that in there still not sure about the position of that it's another sample that I took yeah so in the end I ended up putting this in the foreground here I quite liked it and I haven't done any changes on it much I'll just kind of lighten it maybe lighten it a little bit I might use a render lighting effect on this that's a nice effect this end okay so that's quite nice there I played around bringing it down kind of looked better up here I'm still not sure about it I might just bring another rock in there so the moment I turn that off might be nice to have a bigger rock going down here you know coming in just this part here so hue and saturation gain have been saturation down light up a little bit to check my levels okay so so I'm happy with that I could put more rocks in things but say I'm happy now and I had some kind of lighting effects to put some mist in and things like that so before I do that I'm going to go through and I'm going to layer these but I want to show you how to create the layer groups that I've got so let's do that we got these three here which make up the front rock all I do is select the layers come up to the top here and I go new group from layers and I put front rock and I just hit OK and that's it so all my layers are contained in there and it's nice and easy and I've done the same with the background there so label them and Southey groups and I'll see you in the next lesson where we're starting the atmospheric effects I might put another rock in here in the meantime okay welcome back I've just sort of finished putting these bits in these are labeling these so new group from layers right side so I pretty much got everything organized now and so I'm happy with the composition I've just got to change a few things this side so I'm going to go to my right-hand side and I'm going to select this one and I'm gonna do a duplicate layer of this straight over the top I'm gonna then come down to my hue and saturation and then go light in it and desaturate it click OK now I'm going to select my rectangular marquee and I'm going to set this about 40 and I'll bring it straight down there probably move it here and just delete it and now because I've got the other one underneath we've got this nice distance or haze and then I'm just going to ctrl e to put that straight into that layer I'm also going to check out wherever it looks very good if I move the size of it down it kind of works like that I'm gonna use my smudge tool now and I'm just gonna start to you pull some bits out here this will just sink it down nicely and make it look like there's something going on and now I'm going to do our favorites duplicate the layer again and this time I'm going to vertically flip it now here you can have a problem as it doesn't meet up so I'm going to show you a little tip put it up to there turn this other layer off and go to edit free transform and then use this the warp tool and this will allow you to flex it so I will grab this bring these points down until it kind of works so we're trying to get it so it kind of meets kind of like that should near enough okay click apply and then we can go back into our usual thing it's gonna drag these out just put that down there okay you know I'm gonna turn I've got my razor on stop to cut through here as usual blow this up a bit don't need any of that we don't see any of that so don't worry there we go put that rock in front see where I'm going with this so it's just to give the impression here I don't want to come out too far yeah so that's it so it's a little shadow which makes quite a big difference to this turning it on and off because sometimes I don't spot let's spot some of the bits that I need to delete it makes it easier to do if you just turn it on and off that's not bad so that's quite nice there so we've got that kind of soft look now we want to put in some kind of light rays so I'm going to come up here and create a new layer like so and this layer I'm going to fill with a white like that now I'm going to use our famous feather in a select inverse and instantly we have a light ray which may not look like a light ray at the moment but as soon as I drop the fill and you can sort of scrag the end like this and then I come up and I go to my gaussian blur' might blow up I can sort of free transform it to create a shop array now I have a ray of light that I can put in and I can start duplicating just like one of those double rays of course you can keep using your free transform that it will adjust the angle as well then and of course some of these rays will going behind so I want to put it behind this from rock so I'm going to drag it down there and then I'm going to duplicate another Ray which I'll put in front of the rock it looks like you get this kind of double effect yeah that's quite nice there so that's good so let's now create some mist so I'm just going to call these ray and we're just gonna create some mist now so I'm gonna grag create a new layer and I'll show you a couple of ways to do this the first way will be using those photograph so bear with me I'm just trying to find a good photograph but this is gonna work really well with it so nice or fluffy kind of fluffy clouds this isn't bad here's one here so I'm going to just snip this like this I'm now going to go into adjustments and we're going to go into levels and the idea here is to try to pull this out so I'm going to go to layer need to make this a layout adjustment so there and we can go to new layer mask reveal all select all ctrl a ctrl C to copy oops to go into this paste it in there ctrl V so copy in there paste it in ok while I'm in here I've got to now go to my levels again and begin to make this black click ok now the filter I'm just gonna use a slight Gaussian blur on it and now I'm gonna go back into this and I'm gonna drag this into here let me apply my layer mask first apply layer mask and drag this into here and there we go but using the wrong layer need to drag him into the correct one which is this one just close these windows these are just all the reference files that I used didn't hear now I should have my so what I do this is a free transform dragged in drop this right down drag this behind the front rock and then of course you can duplicate it you can move it and you can select some of it I put the feather on when I'm selecting like this and I select inverse just delete that the middle bit out that allows you to now move this around and I want to put it underneath I want to put it in the right-hand side underneath this layer so he's moving there fact he might look quite nice over here and that's it so that's how you add kind of atmospheric effects to this get this kind of look and the last thing I'm going to do is just create a new layer this is going to be my tinting layer this just combines everything together you can use gradients I'm just going to show you if it's straight plot that in there and then I go into soft light and then I just bring this down and you get this kind of nice bluey tinge you can if you want to use a gradient across that so they go to normal now that's my gradient soft light again so you get this darker and then it's bluer down the bottom of course if you want to you could go in here take my pasties about 31 and just start some deleting a little bit this blue around here if you want to lose a bit of blue around this area and so that kind of brings us to the end so I hope you've enjoyed this course on map painting and this series continues I actually now will be creating 3d environment and I'll be using this map painting and I'll be compositing at all in After Effects we've animation as well so we'll have things like the waterfall going and things like that so that will be in the next course that'll kind of follow on from this map painting course so stay tuned for that I will do a newsletter on this and by the time I the newsletter goes out beginning November I should have that course finished so they're both be on there so you can just work through this one and then take it to the next stage if you're into doing any sort of 3d work or compositing work so this course yeah its format painters but it's also as you can probably tell gives you an insight into how to use Photoshop more effectively so it covers a couple of a few few categories really concept painting as well this is a quick way of putting a concept together this sort of this sort of standard of of matte painting here this standard dish this one here should take you less than an hour and a half maybe less depends on the detail but of course you could spend weeks on this if you wanted to so I hope you've enjoyed this lesson I hope it hope it's helped you and I'll see you in the next lesson where we'll be carrying on with a next project lesson where we'll be carrying on and taking this to the 3d stage

Channel: ZBrush Courses by mojomojo design

Views: 34,078

Keywords: matte Painting, free matte painting, free digital retouching, digital photoshop courses, free photoshop tutorials, lessons in photoshop, digital paiting techniques

Id: XRkCllVuEbs

Length: 112min 37sec (6757 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 03 2011