[Scharb]

Stunning! I love it. Looking forward to final version.

[bpsola]

here's my latest. will just continue this tomorrow :)

[bpsola]

getting there. I'll leave it for a few days first then go back for some revisions. hope you guys like it :)

[bpsola]

Here's the breakdown of the painting

[Ricardo Garces]

Hi Bryan.

From all the entries I have been following, I think you have the best chance of winning. Most of the guys are not realizing that their cloud planes are separated from the atmosphere and thus look like two separate images.

Your image is the first I see that has a good integration of the clouds and the planets.

Yet I have to give some advice that I hope more people read and use in their pieces.

Even if the Director, Concept Art department or anyone else hand you a plate and say "here, make this into a mattepainting" like it happened this time with this contest, you must NEVER forget these images have to be the closest to reality as possible, and therefore they must obey the same rules as reality.

Which means that even if this is an image of a cloud layer in the upper atmosphere, you still need to think about the "story" behind the image.

Is this daylight!? or Night time? Is it Winter or summer? Is this a Earth like atmosphere or completely alien?

Given that, is does not do any wrong in making a little investigation into clouds, for instance...

And you would realize that these types of clouds are called Cumulonimbus, the only type of dense cloud that reaches these heights.

But above these there are more atmosphere and different cloud types.

If this is a daylight image, the sky would not be dark, stars would not be seen. And the planet and sun would look like those days when we can see the moon during the day.

If it is night time, I am guessing these planets will be casting a huge shadow on "our" planet. The clouds will not be white. White will only show on the outer rim of the top layer clouds from light that is passing through.

This is not an easy competition. There are great pieces out there but in my opinion yours is without any doubt one of the best.

I would either add a perspective haze plate to the higher sky and planets part of the image, or darken the clouds so as to have a night feel to them.

Will you be animating this matte? Please do so.

Good luck mate!

[bpsola]

Hi ricardo! thank you so much for the good words :D all the things you said was right and i do agree with that :) If you're gonna ask me, is it day or night? I'll tell you it's both.. what makes portion of this matte night? it's the shadow casted by the big planet at the back, and of course the day portion was the areas casted by the sun. My treatment is more like the effect of an eclipse due to the presence of these 2 big planets at the back. assuming that the light emitting planet in the bg is a sun. I'll try to work on this next time to refresh my eyes in this piece. Thanks for dropping by! :)

[gitchas]

Nice job...You deserve it

Good Luck

Girish
gitchas.4ormat.com

[Dmitriy]

Great job!

And I want to ask you to comment my WIP:
http://mattepainting.org/vb/showthread.php?t=7645

I need some other opinion to understand what's wrong i do.

[kire]

very nice work so far

and@ricardo, that comment was great

[bpsola]

Thanks guys :D I'll be posting my final painting once the "final entries" sticky thread's created. cheers!