Ciff Wall and Ocean Rock

[B. Kachel]

Here are two of my latest matte paintings.

http://stu.aii.edu/~bjk361/cliff_wall2.jpg

This is by far my largest matte painting, as well as photoshop file I've done so far. It measures 14400 px by 5440 px. I have yet to composite it, but the shot starts close up behind myslef and pulls back to reveal the enormous cliff face. If you look closely you will be able to see me in the center.

http://stu.aii.edu/~bjk361/ocean_rock3%20copy.jpg

This is a quick matte painting, just wanted to do something with water, so I went and shot some plates out at Lake Superior in Duluth Minnesota. I also plan on compositing some foreground elements, liven the tree up and add some smoke to the ship.

[stormeffex]

hey brandon, that cliff shot is amazing. it's so freaking huge. you did a great job at color matching/balance.

[bcottman]

Hi Branden. Nice images. I particularly like the one of lake superior. It reminds me of something from Pirates of the Caribbean. My only comment would be that the palm tree is just kind of hanging from the corner, maybe you could give a little more indication of the island its on. Just a thought.

Id be interested to see your reference images.

Brenton

[rrische]

Terrific, as usual!

A tip for doing long camera push-ins/ outs and power of ten
shots....

Take your first camera position and do your matte painting that
covers twice the area seen by the lens. Do this painting at, say,
4k. When you're done, make a copy and res it down to 2k. Drop this
image into a new 4k file and keep painting outwards. Repeat this
process until you've covered everything the camera sees during the move.
When your camera reaches the edges of the first painting, dissolve
to the next. Lather, rinse, repeat.
You can use these files in either a compositing program, or a 3D program,
whatever suits the kind of shot you're doing.
This keeps you from having to paint one gigantic massive Photoshop
painting, where one single layer is a gigabyte. Just a suggestion.

[B. Kachel]

Thanks for the tip Rick. Also I was wondering if it would be fine to take smaller sections of the paintng and place them in the correct position and render each section with an alpha with the same camera pull back and then re-import those renders, and then render them all together.

Again thank you for the feed back

-Brandon Kachel

[rrische]

You mean chop the painting into a bunch of tiles and render em
one at a time? Haven't done that, but I guess it would work.
However, this doesn't address the problem you'll have in Photoshop
with file size, since you're painting will still have to be in one big piece.