Digital Matte Painting // Exercises & Project 1

Digital Matte Painting // Exercises & Project 1

Ibrahim Fazal Ahmad / 0337423

Digital Matte Painting / Bachelor of Design (Hons) in Creative Media / Taylors University 

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INSTRUCTIONS 

For our first class, we're greeted by Mr Kannan and given a quick overview of this classes projects and objectives. We were then given a little explanation of the usage and utility that Digital Matte Painting has in media. After which we were given our first exercise. 

Paint nine digital landscapes, analyse the picture and find the:

• Horizon Line
• Vertical Line
• Vanishing Point
• Complete a Value Paint

Here are my nine attempts at different types of landscapes. 

Exercise 1:

For our next exercise, we were supposed to find a photo and change the sky in the picture to several different times of day. 

Exercise 2:

After our exercises, we had to continue onto Project 1. I had started on this mountain range shown below, but Mr Kannan informed me the image I chose doesn't look very real. Due to this he asked me to choose another image and do it instead.

Here is the progress on the new image, honestly the colour picking part isn't too bad for me since I think I have a good sense of colour. But getting the proportions and other small details right is really tedious and difficult for sure. Also just getting the subtle nuances in texture that a lot of these landscape photos have is really difficult. Just trying to make sure it doesn't look like just a digital over is hard.

We were asked to do three different landscapes and focus on properly refining one, so I did an additional two quickly and focused on further refining the one I had from the previous week. It was rather difficult in terms of time to keep up but I managed to finish them to the best of my capabilities.

After this, I continued and finished Project 1 and moved onto Project 2 as requested by Mr Kannan as it seems like it will take much longer and is much more difficult. I am a little worried about Project 2 since Digital Matte in itself just seems tedious and difficult. Also since none of us have done this before we are going to struggle even more so... hope this goes over well next project.

REFLECTION

So far DMP has been treating me.. okay. Since we haven't done much yet at least. It was all rather simple exercises and I'm worried that I am not prepared for the jump in difficulty that will come in Project 2 and 3. I've seen examples of Digital Matte and they look so... hard. I am more proned to drawn and have an illustration like style when I do work so having to stick to strict hyper-realism is a huge difficulty of mine. I also just feel stressed overall by the amount of work at times. I've observed that Digital Matte is actually in so many things but we've just never taken notice. Movies especially is something I hadn't realised utilised digital matte painting so heavily to capture the atmosphere of the environment the movie takes place in.