Digital Matte Painting - Project 1, 2 and Final Project

25.04.2024 - 08.08.2025 / Week 01 - Week 16
Ilhan Rayan bin Khairul Anwar / 0361205
Digital Matte Painting / Bachelor of Design (Honours) in Creative Media
Project 1, 2 and Final Project

---

INSTRUCTIONS

---

PRACTICAL

Project 1

For our Project 1 of Digital Matte Painting, we had to create three invisible set extensions where we take a baseplate image and add on other elements to it to create a new environment.

Figure 1.1: Mood Board

I started off by creating a mood board for what I wanted to create for this module. I wanted to have an old religious building, like a cathedral or a church, in the middle or near a mountain range that looks abandoned or empty. I loosely based this concept off of an idea from a personal project of mine where there is a massive church-like building connected into a mountain.

Figure 1.2: Invisible Set Extension Idea 1

For the first idea, I wanted to have a massive cathedral be the main centerpiece of this design and have a pathway leading to it down the middle. I managed to find a really good photo what worked with what I had in mind and from there I added in the church as well as the dead trees.

Figure 1.3: Invisible Set Extension Idea 2

For the second idea, I came up with the idea when I found the baseplate and decided that I wanted to have a bridge that connected the two sides together with a massive building on the opposite end of the bridge.

Figure 1.4: Invisible Set Extension Idea 3

For the third idea, I wanted to add an archipelago to the beach of a costal city which was a concept from my own person work that I wanted to try and create via digital matte painting. In the end Mr. Kannan liked the second idea the most so I decided to move forward with that one.

Project 2

For our project 2, we had to polish our set extension and make sure it's ready to use for our final project.

Figure 2.1: Set Extension

Because I already had most of it created, I simply updated some of the textures used and asked Mr. Kannan for feedback, to which he said that realistically the mountains in the background would not be so high quality as the further away something is, the blurrier it gets. He also said I should cut down the size of the mountain because it wouldn't be that big realistically either.

Figure 2.2: Updated Background

After partially blurring out the background and shortening the mountain, I decided to get rid of the building I had in mind as I couldn't find a way to make it look nice without heavily modifying it and removing elements which would take too much time. I also tried adding in another waterfall but Mr. Kannan said that it didn't look very good so I decided to scrap the idea all together.

Figure 2.3: Mr. Kannan's Feedback screenshot

After showing this to Mr. Kannan, he told me that I should try making a river instead of another waterfall but I was too lazy to try and come up with a way to make it look nice so I moved on from that idea. He also said that the textures of the bridge should match up with the textures of the mountain it's connected to which was going to be a difficult challenge for me. He also said that I should try and add statues to the end of the bridge as well as a building far off in the distance rather than having it be up close so that it would make sense visually. After receiving his feedback, I moved onto trying to recreate what he told me. I also realized that the final submission had to be in a 16:9 format and I was using a 4:3 format, so I updated the canvas size and resized everything so that it would fit.

Figure 2.4: Digital Matte Painting Final Design Output

After working out what to do, I started by adding in the statues at the bridge as those would have been the easiest elements to add. After cropping them out of their original photo, I shrunk them down and used a clipping mask to give them a darker effect so that it would look old and abandoned. Next I moved onto adding the building, which I decided to do a castle instead of a religious building since I struggled to find one that was easy to crop out. Once I found one that looked nice, I brought it in and softly erased the ground it was on so that it would blend in smoothly with the ground from the baseplate. Finally for the bridge, I realized I could use images as clipping masks so I created duplicate textures from the baseplate and pasted them across the bridge I added in so that it would have the same texture as everything else. 

Final Project
For the final project, we had to take our final output and create a 15-30 second video with it. We also had to have elements move in the video so it would be a 2.5D production. Because I created my matte painting on Procreate, I exported the file as a Photoshop file and made some tweaks on Photoshop and exported three different PNGs which included the foreground, midground and background so that I could try and have them move separately. I didn't want to do anything extreme so I created a very simple video of the camera panning to the right and lighting up when the castle comes into view. I also had the left part of the final output move separately from the rest of the final output so I could have something moving in order to make the 2.5D effect. While it is incredibly simple, I was in a rush and didn't want to do extra work.

Figure 3.1: Digital Matte Painting Final Video

Video Link: https://youtu.be/VyHBPCAylas

Final Compilation

---

REFLECTION

I found this module to be very interesting, I wasn't that intrigued at first but as time went on, I found it to be more and more fascinating as I realized I could visualize the locations in my own person project without needing to draw it out or use AI generated images which I detest. I really enjoyed the first two projects for this module but I was not interesting in making the 2.5D animation at all. I want to focus on conceptual ideas and storyboarding rather than having to do any animation related work so I didn't really try with the video. I do plan to try and do more digital matte painting in the future for my own personal projects though as the process was very interesting, however next time I will try and use Photoshop instead of Procreate for the creation process.