Winter Village

A fairly basic background replace. Just needed to do a heavy undistort, get all the pesky tourists out and go to work on populating the background with moody higher altitude info.

Also needed to really kill the levels and reduce the dynamic range slightly to sell the new lighting scenario.

Here is the reference base plate, credit goes to Wolfgang Staudt:

A night in Yemen Past

A matte painting utilizing quite a few different techniques, 3d projection, UV cards, camera facing billboards & 3d assets.

Here is a link to the video result
https://vimeo.com/43635857
Password: shinji
And some stills taken from it:

Basic steps were:
1. Undistort plate, removing barrel distortion
2.Clean plate ( focussing on removing modern elements such as satallites and modern plumbing)
3. Paint in new elements such as building outcrops, new mountain range & sky
4. Pull RGB masks for all elements and apply basic levels and grade for Night treatment.
5. Take WIP matte into Maya and model support geometry for projections using Proj camera.
6. Setup an animated camera and double check 'bleed' & also distortion issues.
7.Finish matte painting and extract different projection passes.
8. Added 3d Palm trees, billboard flares and animate skydome.
9.Render out passes in Maya
10. Composite in After Effects & add flare and camera motion blur etc.
11. Render out and go surfing :)

Here is the base plate image taken by Richard Messenger:

Example of scene in Maya:

Alchemy cause all the kids are doing it

Just a couple of abstract ones done from some pretty rudimentary alchemy shapes, both have a fairly us vs. them comp.

Crusty Council

Another couple of paints based of the symmetry imagery i made. Basically just head shots of foreign delegates of the intergalactic crustacean council or something to that effect.

Elemental symmetry

Starting to make use of some of the reference imagery that I created last year with a simple little app that takes photos with an elected axis of symmetry.

This is my first usage of it to make some Fire & Water elementals.

Mariner's Call

It's well into 2012 and Ive only now managed to squeeze out a personal scribble due to a hectic couple of months at work.

This one is simply a therapeutic exercise and just started with an old 5min BW thumb and just working into it and finding some story in there.

Glacial shapes aka lasso, smear & highlight

Here's a little lunchtime waster. Just tried to establish a soft fantasy style for depicting a glacial tundra using some random compositions I painted into. I also attached a visual example of the process.