Ludovic Iochem returns to help fxphd build a full digital matte painting curriculum. Today, matte painters need to know a lot of various techniques. They're often involved in shots that require some 3D or 2,5D technique, and it's definitely a plus if they can manage to do all of this by themselves. But the base of the work is still the painting one which happens in Photoshop. Matte Painters needs to be very familiar with photo manipulation, day to night, summer to winter, clean up or set extensions.
We'll focus on the painting, and we'll go through all the major techniques that a DMP artist needs to know. We'll explain all the different techniques, share some tips, and do practical example. The idea is to present all of them, in real time, with a lot of description and explanations. It's not one big project, it's a lot of small ones to demonstrate techniques.
By the end of the course, members should have a good understanding of all the cases that a DMP artist should know.
Prof Ludovic Iochem is a Digital Matte Artist - Environment Artist working at Double Negative, London. His credits include a lot of very various projects, from Bourne Ultimatum, Quantum of Solace, Tree of Life, or Love in the time of Cholera, to Thor - the Dark World, Hellboy 2, Total Recall or Dredd. He's now working as Lead Environment Artist, and is currently involved in the next Ridley Scott project, the book of Exodus. With Nick Marshall, he was an instructor for NUK307 Advanced Matte Painting term for the October 2012 term.
Focus on Matte Painting Techniques
Watch our overview of the course
Class Listing
Class 1
Main tools from Photoshop. We present all the major tools (Clone, Grading Tool, Selection, Brushed, Alpha, Layers, Channels, Transform) that we use in PS to do DMP. We explain how to use them, and what we can do, or cannot do.
Class 2
Clean Up technique for DMP + Sky replacement + Lighting. On a practical example, we explain how to replace the sky of a photo, clean up some elements which needs to be removed, and we work on the light, overall, to adapt the environment to the new sky.
Class 3
Day to night technique. We take a photo shot during the day, and we transform it as if it has been shot during the night. We see how to remove shadow, grade it for night, and put some artificial lights.
Class 4
New to Abandoned technique Part 01 (clean up, dirt, trash, graffiti, broken bits...). In this small project, we take a photo of a nice street, and we transform it as if it has been abandoned for a long time. We add graffiti, dirt, trash, broken bits, etc.
Class 5
New to Abandoned technique Part 02. This is the second part of our small project started earlier.
Class 6
On a production, it is crucial to be able to quickly block the composition of a shot by painting a first version of a DMP in just few hours. Here is how to do it on an example that involved the replacement of the all background of a plate, from the brief, to the DMPv01.
Class 7
Summer/Winter + day to night part 1 (project using all the techniques we have seen before). Lets start another project, to use all the techniques we have seen before. In this project, we transform a daytime photo taken in summer, into a nighttime photo supposed to have been taken in winter. We reuse everything we have done before.
Class 8
Summer/Winter + day to night part 2
Class 9
Summer/Winter + day to night part 3
Class 10
We'll explore few different techniques to convert a photo taken in summer into a winter shot.