relatively new site

[chickensoup]

Hello, my name is Andrew Leung and I just wanted to say hi to matte painting.org and share my site: http://drew.anihaus.com . I've been working in visual effects for the last three years and was a freelance illustrator before that. Anyways, any comments are welcomed and I hope to posting more frequently soon.

thanks!
-drew

[drutter]

Hi Andrew,

Really nice work and a well designed site. You look just like the portrait on the opening page. I think we almost met at that Ryan Church demo at the last siggraph. Were you hanging out with Michelle Moen?

The sky captain breakdowns are very effective.

Dan

[Brandon]

love the site and your work! great style!

[chickensoup]

drutter - Thanks! Yeah, you were with Brenton Cottman right? I was nerding out over finding out that you could rotate the canvas with such ease in painter. I'm still surprised that Photoshop hasn't implemented anything like that.

brandon - thanks!

-drew

[smooth]

Nice work. I especially like those "Rome" matte paintings. Feel free to give us a breakdown on one of those if you want :)

+smooth+

[chickensoup]

Thanks smooth! I don't have breakdowns for the Empire paintings. But what I can say is that several of them were originally handed to me by another contractor in which I took over to finish the work. A lot of it ended up being hand painted mostly because you can't exactly find photo reference of ancient rome. We had did research on italian architecture with hope that things like italian roofs looked the way they do today. I used basic block models done in XSI for general layout and perspective, but then added in reflected light and broken texture to break it up. The huge pan down matte painting, was done by three matte painters including myself. It's actually a frankenstein painting where i took two other matte paintings for the same show, combined them and then added the deep background and clouds. I ended up spending more doing clean up, forcing the perspective into place, and relighting than if I had started from scratch. The painting eventually was multiplaned into 16 different layers for a subtle feeling of parallax, and was comped together on an inferno. The crowd replication at the bottom was a combination of another vendor and the house I was working at. That itself was a judoing of another shot and my painting put into one. The difficult part with any of these paintings was making it feel like it was in Italy and in ancient Rome, than the San Fernando Valley in California.

The Rome burning and Rome day ended up becoming a complete overpaint and repaint of an another painting, and a lot of noodling by hand to add details into lo-rez block models. In the burning one, I ended up having to paint out a lot of the hard shadows because it was day for night, and basically make everything look overcast (I had started with the day one first). On my website, you're actually looking at the fire reference painting I gave as ref for the inferno artist to comp. I also brought up the gamma a little so that you could see a little more detail on my website. It's a little crushed because I brought up the gamma on the 8 bit version, instead of the 16 I was working on.

In the one of the roman horsemen running towards camera, that's your all purpose castle on a hill matte painting. The matte line is at the edge of the foreground grass and continues as a roto job over the horsemen. the rest is matte painting and combining photos. With the exception of the villa on the hill, which actually ended up being completely hand painted (no photo ref), including the drafting of perspective was done by hand. It just would've been a waste of time to build a 3d model given the 3 day deadline I had for the painting.

The nice thing about working at HD rez is that it's about half a k smaller in size in comparison to full film res. It's slightly more forgiving than at film rez. My favorite is painting for commercials, in which most of those almost always deliver in D1 video format. With that, a lot of times you can end up hand painting the details faster than you finding the texture to add more detail. Everything is just so completely mushy.

Anyways, I hope that helps smooth...

-drew