Maybe some of you have seen this. I consider it a benchmark to try to achieve in 3D.
http://home.comcast.net/~chrisstoski/starwars_cjh_cyc_large.html
There's a pretty good book about which highlights a step by step guide on how he achieved this particular matte painting, sorry forget the name right now. The city blocks are pretty basic 3D shapes with no textures, and have only been used to get shadows, highlights and z-depth in greyscale. Almost all of this has been painted in photoshop.
That sky looks a lot like a photograph... maybe it was.
:o
Quote from: Mohawk20 on May 27, 2009, 04:29:51 PM
That sky looks a lot like a photograph... maybe it was.
Several according to the write up.
the book is d'artiste: Matte Painting its a real good read!
and yeah the sky is a photo
Cheers chap, couldn't remember the title. Agree fully, it's a very good book. It sort of takes a lot of the mysticism out of this sort of work, although there's still bag loads of talent and a good eye needed.
yeah Im a big fan of dylan cole I love all of his work ;D
Thanks for these replies. I had assumed it was 100% painted. I don't know why since matte painters use any method that works. Interesting that the sky started from photos. I think that you could possibly create skies in TG2 that were rich like this. Ideally I'd like to procedurally create cityscape style TG2 terrains but there are a number of problems. I haven't tried much model importing to TG2 so have no idea how far you could go with that.
I have greeble blooks and a few blocks from scifi 3d whick look similar to this I could give it a shot me thinks :)
One thing that came out of that book was the amount of artists that use real photographs to distort into perspective, and then blend them in to the picture. This approach works really well to make up complicated non-repeating textures, which tends to be a lot more intuitive and immediate when knocking up mattes.
I had thought that possibly you could build up blocks from models even the same model.
Unfortunately I need a faster computer to really get more into what I'd really like to do in TG2. I'm just imagining possibilities until (soon) I have some more time to work at it and cash to build a new computer.