[Thor]

I welcome any comment or suggestions, Thanks :)
This is one of my concepts for my thesis. I have four different matte paintings that I need to have done by fall.

[Alex Jenyon]

Find some reference - or even better, go out to the coast and see what moonlight on the ocean REALLY looks like.

It doesn't look like this! Not under any natural circumstances - light always travels in straight lines, and bounces in a reasonably predictable way. The earth has a certain curvature, which tells you how far away the horizon should be, and water surfaces always try to be as flat as possible.

These are physical laws, and you can't break them without good reason. Within these natural boundaries there are lots of possibility for creativity and experimentation, outside them your shot isn't doing to look real.

This is more realistic:



Hope that gives you some pointers.

AJ

[Thor]

Thanks for the help, the ocean I am doing in Cinema 4D. The picture reference helps out tremendously. It is hard to visualize the layers and how they will be placed once I import them into AE or NUKE, so I place a reference layer to get a general placement. I know that not all matte paintings are animated and remain static as backdrops, but I wanted to show some parallax in each of the four that I am doing.

thank you for your insight, it helps a lot.