Digital Matte Painting

Hi, my name is Samuel Cleall. I thought I'd share a brief introduction into how I started learning about Visual Effects

I recently quit my full-time job as an LED wall and Projector Technician to pursue a career that I have always had an interest for. Although I worried about being too old for a career change and I had just start to experience a new life of being a father, I decided to take the risk and go to university to study VFX. On top of my studies, I also took on additional learning with MattePaint.com on their 12-week intensive DMP course, which truly re-adjusted my artistic vision from standard university work to Industry standard work. 

I'm now coming to the end of my 2-year Foundation Degree at Nottingham Confetti, and excited to hopefully land my first job in the industry and showcase my work to everyone.

My First Year DMP Module

The below image (and sequence) was created in my first year of university on the Matte Painting module. The idea was to create a 2D plate and introduce 3D assets and composite it together in Nuke. 

Although at the time, I thought I did a really good job, my misunderstanding of what DMP was, lead to a sequence that was more concept based than a finished Matte Painting but I believe is also important to look back on and realise the mistakes made to further progress. This is also a great marker to show my progress over the 3 months during the MattePaint course I took later in the year.

Analysing the sequence now after studying more, I can see many things wrong with it, for example;

- Multiple light sources
- Black and white levels
- Perspective and scale issues
- Inconsistency of blurs, noise and sharpness
- Sharp mask lines

Nonetheless, this module peaked my interest into the world of Matte Painting and pushed me to where I am today with my current work.

Progression After The MattePaint Intensive Course

The MattePaint 12-week intensive course was incredibly insightful and as mentioned in the name, very intense. Whilst on my university course, juggling family life and taking on this course, it certainly got a little hectic but with appropriate time management, I managed to carry on with all the above as normal (with a few extra coffees). 

"The Knights Keep" was my final week assignment which brought all the new techniques and methods learnt over the 3 month course together. This piece was inspired by The Witcher and Game Of Thrones when coming up with an idea and was my first personal digital matte painting.

There are certainly more aspects to this piece I would like to improve on in addition to composition as this can always be improved. These aspects include

- Improvement on the midground layer as it almost seems like there is a bit of a cut off from the foreground and background
- Extending the wall further to carry on along the cliff edge
- Creating more of a story to the image. The whole concept is based around medieval times therefore horses, knights, extra areas of the building to give the impression of an entrance to the side of the cliff would help with this

The breakdown for "The Knights Keep" can be seen on my reel which can be viewed at the bottom of the page.

Below are some more of the DMP's that I completed on the MattePaint course. All breakdowns can be seen on my reel which is at the bottom of the page.

1 - Advanced Clean up, Sky Replacement, and Set Extension, Matching light, Perspective and time of day.
2 - Original Plate

1 - Basic CG asset integration and compositing in Nuke, 2D tracking, Matching black and white levels. 
2 - Original plate

1- Advanced sky replacement with clean up
2 - Sky replacement with clean up
3 - Original plate

1 - CG Asset Integration (weathering, ageing, replacing parts of render to brake CG feeling), and Clean up
2 - Original Plate

1 - Complex masking, Sky replacement, and set extension
2 - Original plate

University Matchmove Module

The matchmove module gave me the opportunity to apply skills recently learnt on the MattePaint course and push the narrative of my matchmove more towards a DMP sequence that would have been more appropriate for my first year DMP assignment. 

You may recognise the location "Wollaton Hall" as it was used for Wayne Manor in the 2012 film, The Dark Knight Rises, which also assisted with my inspiration for this sequence. 

I used a typical Matchmove pipeline to achieve the final sequence for example Source footage, evaluate footage, camera data (Onset data such as camera info, set measurements, chromeball/greyball, HDRI), 2D tracking, camera solve, orient scene, test solution, geometry layout, and deliver.

Once tracked and exported from 3DE, I imported into the Maya scene and used the generated point cloud to build a low-res geometry of my scene to see if the Track worked. The steps made to ensure an easy scene set up were

- Find the point cloud that would resemble the ground

- Remember this point cloud and highlight the group, snap the transform tool by holding d+v and dragging to this marker

- Once on the marker, snap to the grid and rotate to match the plane to the perspective of the footage

Above shows a before and after of what the scene looks like when the 3DE scene is first imported, and how it should match with the grid once correctly rotated

To be able to match the brick work of my plate, I had to create my own texture rather than use a basic material or smart material that could be found in Substance Painter. I used Substance Designer to create my texture as the benefits of creating this texture in Designer, enabled me to work in a non-destructive workflow. Any alteration needed to the pattern of the texture or displacements meant I could easily re-open the file and change specific areas

I used the Redshift render engine over Arnold mainly because of render time, but also because Redshift is used in quite a few studios. Getting used to different render engines now I feel is beneficial when looking ahead for jobs.

I chose to do a basic sky projection to replace the original sky as although both are overcast, the original had no variation in clouds, therefore was a bit boring to the eye.

The sky I chose to use was a HDRI from MattePaint.com and was 32-Bit exr, 8k resolution

One way to fix areas of exposure in Nuke and to check if areas of the image are clamped, is by using ‘Clip Warning’ tab in the top right of Nuke. To adjust accordingly, I first exposed down until I stopped seeing these exposed areas.
During this process, Nuke is telling us is that the areas greyed out are above 1, so reducing the exposure ‘Stops’ down to a place where the greyed areas are gone, we get to a position where none of these values are above one and is now correctly exposed. Bringing the exposure down to -1.8 gave me the best results for my sky replacement

The techniques used for my image restoration were all done in Adobe Photoshop, with the plan to project the clean-up layers on cards in Nuke.

Due to the sequence being a panning shot, I had to choose frames that were mostly in focus to be able to deliver a clean-up plate that matched the pixels in the footage when panning. Throughout the sequence, there are people walking around in the shot, therefore the sections that I initially cleaned up had to be extended to make sure when the sequence was played, wouldn’t be seen in the shot.

After cleaning up in Photoshop and exporting as Tif files, I imported them with their alphas to then project back over the footage with a frame hold. 

Final Nuke Script

Showreel, 2021.

Thank you for taking the time to read through my entry here at the The Rookie Awards 2022, and please feel free to leave a comment with feedback about my work/progress as there is always room for improvement!