Adding motion to matte paintings

[Sidewinder]

Hi,

It seems pretty obvious to me that matte painting is something that anyone with a love of photoshop and classical art can master pretty easily. I come from the post production world where after effects is the tool I use for about 70% of my work. I have made a few nice looking mattes but I am wondering if anyone has any links or explinations of how to add movement to the elements of matte paintings.

THe tools for movement that i have used so far are:
Particle illusions (water falls)
Psnami
'Foam' and other particle generators for leaves
and Ripple/rain

A) has anyone come across other tools that can be used to make natural elements move eg water, trees.

B) how can you add motion to a tree that is only a picture? I have tried morphs but they stink. I think the best way will be to paint with video of natural elements.

C) does anyone use texture makers similar to
http://www.textureshaker.com for mattes. Whereby you give it an element and it gives you a random texture.

D) I went to a material store the other day and bought a few meters of blue for taking with me on my matte shoots...I have fiddled with this idea for awhile now and it seems to work...blue screening elements that I will use in my mattes. Does anyone do this?

To me it seems more of an art to get extremely subtle movements in to painting and this is something that I would like to persue in the future.

[Tchook]

hi
im also working a lot with after effect.
and im also trying to do the thing you do, but
The best way to add moving elements is to shoot them; even with a dv cam.
work with high rez comp (at least 2k). T he key is to find good matte lines to ingrate your footage.
A
Ther is one plug that you might be interested in, its "particular" (from trapcode), there is a free trial on ther website (you know with the red cross) its a real 3d environment particles, it does not everithing but it worth a try.

B
Regarding trees, i think its very difficult to fake it in post. but ive try something with "card dance" or "card wipe" which might be in the production bundle now.
i isolated the branches and made some layers for the leaves and apply one of those plug. It as kind a loose effect (almost liquid) but with a big amount of layers you can fake it.
but nothing will be better than a real footage.


C
No i dont use it sorry.

D
yeah blue screen might be usefull, but it realy depend on what conditions you are lighting it. I prefer roto, but thats just me.

hope that helps.

[kaz]

ok im using combustion not AE i have the same question how would u capture these images like a tree and mask it out u really need to mask out the outer elements in then the middle of each branch? and when u guys talk about 2K images what is exactly what you guys are talking about?

[Slave]

Maybe dylan can help us out with this one? Since hes the master of the Matte Painting Element ...:) If u look a this demo theres alot of motion added to his matte paintings .. From what i know,projections in 3d is how you get these elements ..and alot of motion blur ..hhaaaa
Check out Blur Studios ..they have some amazing stuff for game trailers ..for example ..the warcraft trailer with falling rose petals ..sticks out in my mind ..Also the end of the trailer for warhammer D.A.W. very cool ..
O.k. thats my 2 bits ...
over and out

[Tchook]

2k means 2000 pixels wide.
like 2048X1556 or 1920x1440 in pixels
its a scan and shoot format

[mgiaro]

for the tree animation, particle illusion has a special particle but it's an hypnotic movement, not so "real".
In cinema 4d you can use animated texture and loop, and maybe useful with sea-shore and tree.
But these are rookie-suggestions...

[P.Nagle]

A) The best tools to make trees move is to make real trees move go out and shoot somewhere that looks like your location then rotoscope around thos trees and do an extention or shoot the trees against blue and pull a key on it. Or use maya's dynamic engine to help simulate realistic movements liike air and turbluance then maybe write a random expression based on the frame number or time.

B) Yes use natural elements. to make a matte in motion believable or to sell a shot you need a triangle of believability something had to be real to sell realism.

c)No i have never used texture shaker, i would rather hand paint my textures. because i know what i am getting and i can only count on me.

d)Your going to need a thick material and some c stands to set up your blue screen and actually if you shooting on dv i wouldnt use blue i would use green, its going to be a bit easier to pull a key on(pulling a key on dv footage with a 4:1:1 color sampling is horribly hard.) I have use a greenscreen room and a protable green screen for a couple shots and it works pretty good but you will end up rotoscoping anyways so now i almost just go shoot on location then just roto because i know what i am going to get in the end and it will look more real and you wont have to deal with green spill or dv chatter on the edges of your objects.

The more things in the foreground/middle ground/ bg move it will sell your matte painting, if it is a parallax shift with a slight camera move then that will help hid the matte painting from being so static.

-Patrick Nagle

[mgiaro]

About trees moves and croma-key, there are some interesting tricks in the "making of" dvd of Cast Away. The trees are bonsai on a blue screen with a fan simulating wind.

[NickJushchyshyn]

If you go to www.RustBoy.com (http://www.RustBoy.com) , enter the site, choose the Making Of section from the top set of buttons and then look at article 5 (sorry for that long set of steps) there's a pretty cool explanation about creating moving trees with textures animated onto spheres.

There's also a fairly common 3D technique of taking an still image of a tree (with alpha channel) and mapping that to a pair of 2D "cards". The cards are placed such that, when viewed from the top, they form a plus-sign. When viewed at traditional camera angles, though, the trick forms what appears to be a natural, detailed tree. (with very low render time impact.) This works best with limited camera movement and lots of trees. You could also use a video shot of a tree with rustling leaves to add some motion.

Both of these solutions are applied in either a 3d program or the compositor rather than in creating the mattepainting itself.

[Sidewinder]

thanks a lot for this information, I am following up every link and concept presented in this thread.

A) [tools to make things move] I agree, easier to shoot than to create. However need to get a good camera - must work harder! For the time it takes to do it in post, your better off getting in your car and putting up a screen...the fresh air will do you good.

B) [regarding tree movment] I am interested in seeing the cast away and the rustboy thing (dead link?). Actually the more i look at movement in mattes from films the more i realise that it isn't really as complex as I thought (from what I have seen)...There maybe a few standard birds and a waterfall but it isn't like your going to the detail of ants walking across rocks. why do I get the feeling someone will post an ant on rock link?

C) [regarding machine made textures] I will still look into this..I think it would be a handy tool to have. Also I am going to see if photoshop actions can play a role in matte painting.

d) [regarding blue screen] I started horsing around with different materials for the bluescreen and saw a dull foam/rubber material the other day at a camping store that I might try. A really big problem with bluescreens is that they get folds in them very easily and your continually ironing them to get them out. I was reading that a thick 'carpet like' fuzzy material is also good as it absorbs light.

- :idea: Someone should start a free collection of keyed footage of trees..Hell, you can downloaded everything else you need for mattes. ...Even if it was a 5sec targa sequenced that was .rar'ed it wouldn't be that big. Actually now that I think about it, you could even have an 'ant on rocks/bugs' collection - how hard is it to get a bug to walk on blue?

- :idea: Has someone got a link to their finished matte of tree moving examples? I've downloaded a lot of work from here and I dont think I can recall any.

-a-

[mgiaro]

...and the rustboy thing (dead link?).

There is the comma inckluded. This one should work well!!
http://www.rustboy.com
Marcone

[NickJushchyshyn]

Yeah, the auto HTML feature sucked the comma into there.
I've added a space between the comma and URL in my original post. Should work there too now.

Also, regarting a "good camera", you can always shoot several close-ups of individual branches with a comsumer camera. When reduced in size to fit onto a tree on screen, it should look passable. :)

[kaz]

I'm not an expert in this but I believe that Curtis who was the Bluescreen specialist in pearl harbor said that the best way is not just do one key but create a key for each section that is needed , example if u create one key and you get the head to look great but the rest of the body isnt leave it alone and create a second key to start working the upper body once that is good create another one for other section and so on, about the fold in the screen I think it is not a problem since everywhere i go i see fold shadows and alot of stuff that to you and I would look like it wouldnt work but again doing it by section I think it solves the problems

[kaz]

I saw the movie of the tree making, I actually think its not bad but the lighting and shadows was not correct, as I see the sun on the right background but I'm seeing light and shadow of tree to the left of screen and not coming to the foreground what do you think about this?

[kaz]

how would the 2k system work against video format thats 720x486?

[cameo]

Yea I'd be interested to know that as well actually, say you make some paintings at 2k etc, whats the best way to show them off on a vhs demo reel whilst maintaining the cinematic feeling? Is it just simply a matter of reducing the width to 720 and letting PS or whatever auto set the height and just leave it at that?

Or would having black borders at the top and bottom help to sell it as a painting? If you did do that, what size would you be looking at in terms of the actual image? Since obviously the smaller it becomes, the more detail is lost. How do you pro's go about this?