SCAD X The Mill- Refining Details & Matte Painting

Adding Details to Interior

As from last week, I made some changes to the texture of the interior- seats, metal cables, etc. Especially because the seat is the closest element of the interior that is up close to the camera, I focused on enhancing the materials of the seat first.

This is the reference that I looked at for the material. I wanted to integrate the dust and scratches on the seams and surface, and the shiny coat that I was to apply after I imported the textures in RS.

This is what the details that I added look like-

This is the reference that I looked at for the material. I wanted to integrate the dust and scratches on the seams and surface, and the shiny coat that I was to apply after I imported the textures in RS.

This is what the details that I added look like, before and after-

And how this made to Dee’s shot 03 with the adjusted materials.

We thought that we could use some more details- such as more grime, and some displacement to indicate surface imperfections and wrinkles. This is to be implemented during the following week, and handed off to Dee for any changes.

Shot 06- Matte Painting

Natasha, our mentor, suggested trying matte painting for shot 06 instead of dressing the set due to heavy geometry and multiple rendering issues with heavy poly count. As our team agreed that it would be best that our compositor and matte painter, Mateo, focus on compositing the rendered shots, I took over the responsibility.

These were the references Mateo handed me over to match. I focused on the formation of the terrain, the color of each element, and how they are scattered.

I had the render of the terrain, and decided to use this as a base for my matte painting. I exported three frames- the first one, the one in the middle, and the last in attempt to track how far the camera moves.

As the camera was viewing the scene with an angle, and the terrain closer to the camera had some elevations that were visibly parallel, these three frames were not lining up as perfect as I anticipated it would be. After some consideration of compositing, I decided to base the canvas on the longest iteration.

The particular angle made it more difficult to gather image resources to kitbash. I downloaded some terrain textures, and separate rock & bush pngs that I could place in the scene. I also gathered some aerial photos of mountains and cliffs in an attempt to borrow some of the surface textures from it.

I created a multiply mask based from the 3D plane to better tie the light direction together.

After everything put together, a slight gradient from top to bottom helps the scene a lot, to better communicate the aerial atmosphere of the environment.

With all of the elements combined, I managed to get a scene that looks like this. Me and my teammates were satisfied with the first iteration, so decided to implement this to shot 06. The matte painting was handed off to Mateo to composite.

Shot 06- Projection with 3D Plane

Me and Mateo were concerned that the matte painting itself might appear too ‘flat’, especially considering that there would be no parallax despite some elements of the terrain being subjected to it. Mateo suggested an idea to export a height map from my matte painting, project it in a plane in Houdini, and see how that would appear in our final product.

To have a height map, I used the 3D filter function in Photoshop after turning off some layers that indicate lighting directions and shadows. Photoshop reads darker values as parts with lower elevation, so I had to make sure I removed as much influence of lighting as possible.

I projected this to a plane in Houdini. After some size & rotation fixes, it was good to be rendered and composited with the rest. We noticed some issues with texture stretches and color changes and made sure it is on our to-do list for this week to address it.

To-Do List for Week 9

• Add Height Map for Tuk-tuk seat

• Resolve texture stretching issues for shot 06

• Resolve render artifacts in shot 06 terrain