Winter house project ...

[everlite]

Hi guys. Looking for a little continued support though a project i'm working on. I'm quite new to matte painting, but very deturmined.

Anyway, so this is probably my third project, my previous projects were very fantasy orianted but this time i wanted to go in the completely opposite direction and recreate something that seems very much like a scene one might see outside, and with that in mind i found this summer house;

http://www.thedaveidentity.co.uk/web/summer_house.jpg
(downloaded from www.istockphoto.com (http://www.istockphoto.com))

Which with a little painting i've come up with this;

http://www.thedaveidentity.co.uk/web/winter_house.jpg

Click here for large version;

http://www.thedaveidentity.co.uk/web/winter_large.jpg

Still very much work in progress, it's more than an educational project more than anything else, just learning the basics. So with a little hope maybe you can help me along :-) All the snow except the ground is hand painted.

The brief is;

Change season - North England, winter

Remain photo realistic and believable.

Add animated elements;

- Car

- Flag

- Flickering candle light in window

- Snow falling

Add camera mapping / projection

So that's where i'm heading.

I've already done the candle, flag and played around with the parallaxing effect, something that previous to two weeks ago i didn't even know existed.

Its coming on well but i still have a lot of questions and doubts over how well it looks. I'll post the animated version asap.

Please, please help me with this one, i really want to get this nailed and move on to more challenging Mattes.

Thanks in advance - Dave.

[everlite]

So here you can see my work in progress, still a long way to go i think, but it's getting there :-)

http://www.thedaveidentity.co.uk/web/comptest1.mov

(3.8mb)

Any suggestion would be really welcome.

cheers - Dave.

[bvz]

looking good so far. You are having some tearing issues because you are projecting the same image on the building as the background. Additionally, you are having some issues within the building (the covered bay dead center in the image). Both of these are fixable (and you may already know how), but if you need some help let me know.

Other than that, I think it is a good start. The scale of the car seems a bit off. I think the transitions from the painted snow to the cc'd plate are a bit soft. I am also distracted by the sharpness of the shadows on the building itself. As desaturated and grey as the colors are, it suggests a very diffuse and overcast environment (backed up by the sky you have chosen). In that kind of a situation, I think the shadows on the building are still too sharp and directional, esp. under the eaves. Also, I would look at adding some depth (both in paint and geometrically) to the foliage in front of the building.

Ok, gonna stop now... but I really dig it so far.

[everlite]

Hey cheers, i've updated this project since the last post, please see:

http://www.thedaveidentity.co.uk/web/housepan1.avi

Very close to been finished. Your quite right about the shadows, they are very sharpe and need to be corrected. And yes the car is a little out of scale. i'm going back onto this and making a few changes. Chris Stoski kindly made a few comments on the link you see above and suggested that i extend the left and right by around 15 feet! but i'm unsure how you set up a panoramic scene for camera projection,are you familiar with this? Also i can't seem to get my head around how you use masks in the 'Camera per pixel' map (max 8 ) any pointers?

Maybe you might also like to see my recent painting:

http://www.mattepainting.org//forum/viewtopic.php?t=2229


Cheers again - Dave

[bvz]

looking better all the time!

As you improve it some things are starting to pop out at me... The sharpness of the shadows is definately one. The car and it's shadows need work as well. I also think you need to work on your camera move a bit. Just a little wobble in it will help remove a lot of the cg feel. It should be visible, but slight enough that the average viewer, when asked, would have not noticed it.

Of course, you will still need to fix the tearing in the actual projection on the building (plus a funky seam right below the flag). And the railing on the roof seems to be projecting on some weird geometry that does not match the image.

The falling snow adds a lot to the image and really starts to help sell it. Some things that might help as well here would be to reduce the amount of movement in the flag, and add a very slight and subtle reflection to the windows.

As to extending the plate... I'm not sure how Max works (haven't used it since 1.0) but a quick solution would be to set up an additional camera, back it up from your projection camera, and project an extended plate from that. There are two ways you could do this, the easiest would be to render a single frame from this new camera at a higher resolution than your projection image, and then paint on that and then use that as the projection camera. The second way would be to follow the steps above, but use an alpha channel to blend between the two projections. I can give more details if needed.

I wish I could give you more info on your tech question, but I just don't know max at all.

Keep working on this, it is really turning out nicely

Ben

[everlite]

Hi, thank you, that's very helpful advice. I'll be able to work on this at the weekend, so yeah, thats a lot to go on.

I'll soften the shadows.

Not quite sure which seam you're pointing to beneath the flag, do you mean the the vertical one to the right?

To be honest i never noticed the squashing aroound the railings, well spotted :wink:

Yes, i'll add the reflections


The second way would be to follow the steps above, but use an alpha channel to blend between the two projections. I can give more details if needed.

This is something that i'm currently trying very hard to understand, for this and a second project i'm working on, how you blend between to mapped cameras. Any advise would be reall helpful.

I'm also wondering how to fix the right edge and top where the image breaks, would this be better to just crop in or would you suggest another way around this?

Camera wobble, yep i'll try that.

How does the car look, it still seems very cg, do you think it does the effect more damage than good?

Some people have said the snow looks very bright?

Do you think maybe i need a little more rolling mist at the bottom?

My original intention with this was to recreate something that sells as been simple and realistic, i wanted to create the scene very much like what i might see as i look out of my window, and here in britain, that's very grey, and very dull, however since doing this a few weeks ago i've begun to feel it needs more depth, but i can't seem to figure out how i might do this, i thought about altering the lighting to be darker, approaching night maybe with a lamp outside illumination the house. For now it just seems too grey, which granted, is what a winter scene in the UK often looks like but it really needs to depart from the saturated look i think.

Prior to doing this i'd never even heard of camera projection mapping, so i found this technique to be very surprising and useful. The project i'm working on now builds upon what i learnt with the winter house (above) except i'm creating the scene in 3d then painting over it and remapping back in, the main trouble so far, is i need to travel between two mapped images, which i currently don't understand More on that one later :-)

I posted this here and in cgtalk, though sadly i received less of a response here :cry: you might like to see the thread in cgtalk:

http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?p=3810766#post3810766

Cheers again, that's really great advice and a lot to think about.

- Dave.

[nickmarshallvfx]

As someone who doesn't know a lot about matte painting or camera projection, Im somewhat a layman when looking at this. The thing that I noticed was that the flag pole looks very blocky. It would be nice to see it a it weathered so it fits in more with the period of the mansion.

Just a minor touch, but thought you might like to know :)

Nick

[everlite]

Thanks, i'll take that in mind.

[RiKToR]

Just to knitpick... The flag is upside down, and for the dynamics of the flag you may want to start your camera move about 30 frames after the initial animation that way we cant see the dynamics kicking in and the flag dropping.