Rick Kamp - Digital Matte Painting

Hi, my name is Rick Kamp. I am currently in my fourth and final year of my education in Visual Effects at The Netherlands Film Academy. In my third year I discovered my interest in digital matte painting and I've been working on developing my skills ever since. 

Even though I want to specialize in DMP, I also have a good understanding of the entire VFX pipeline and thoroughly enjoy doing concept art and compositing and have basic knowledge of 3D modeling and texturing.

Besides my education at The Netherlands Film Academy I've also attended the intensive 12 week Matte Paint Course from MattePaint.com to strengthen and broaden my DMP knowledge and skills. This helped me achieve industry standard quality work and a realistic expectation of junior DMP tasks.

My education is nearing it's end and I am now looking for my first DMP job to take the next step in my career and develop myself further as an artist.

Showreel

First of all feel free to take a look at my showreel. It is a selection of my work of the past two years focused on digital matte painting.

Below I will elaborate on some of the projects, give extra information and show the process.

Short film matte paintings

The DMP above was made for the third year short film 'The Spy I Loved'. The shot was filmed in a forest in Amsterdam, but it needed to be a red cottage in Sweden. I reconstructed the cottage from different reference photos to match the perspective. Mountains in the background and rough terrain with a lake were added. A path and electrical wiring were added to help the composition and guide the viewers eye towards the cottage. Extra life was added to the shot in compositing. I painted a light pass for the light on the ground, added water ripples, subtle flickering of the lights from the windows and swaying of the electrical wires.

The DMP above was made for the fourth year short film 'Over een pastoor op regenlaarzen'. The cars, unwanted signs and other elements needed to be removed. For this a part of the church needed to be reconstructed. For continuity there needed to be a graveyard and pine forest added to the left of the church. Stained glass was added and a wall was added on the right to help the composition of the shot.

The DMP above was made for the graduation short film 'EOS'. For this film I did the VFX supervision, some concept art and digital matte painting. For this shot I was provided with a CG render of the city by the CG team. Because of limited time I made the entire environment in DMP. I worked on top of the render to make sure the compositor could use the AOV's to create a shockwave expanding through the city. The breakdown above shows the process from raw render to final comp.

For more information about EOS you can visit the Rookies entry page for 'Film of the Year - Visual Effects' of EOS following this link.

The Matte Paint Course

The Matte Paint Course was an intensive 12 week program in which all the knowledge, techniques and insights you need as a junior and more were covered. It really helped to deepen my understanding of DMP and the areas in which I needed to improve. 

The course mainly consisted of 2D DMP exercises like clean up, CG overpaint, advanced masking, sky replacements, set extensions and 2.5D projection shots which required generating projection geo, setting up projection cameras, break the DMP up into layers and do the camera tracking in Nuke.

It was a challenge managing to do the course next to my full time education, but it was definitely worth while. Below I will showcase five assignments done for this course. The rest of the work can be seen in my showreel and on my website.

1. (Above) This was my assignment for the final week of the course. For this assignment I had to come up with my own concept, find the right reference and use all the techniques that were covered during the course. For this piece I took inspiration from works from Eyvind Earle, Dylan Cole and Tibor Nadas.

2. (Above) Clean up, advanced masking, sky replacement, set extension, perspective matching, color matching and integration.

3. (Above) CG overpaint, set extension, 2D tracking and compositing in Nuke.

4. (Above) CG overpaint, clean up and integration.

5. (Above) Advanced masking, sky replacement and clean up.

Concept art

The concept art above was made for the graduation short film EOS. For this piece I made a 3D base render using Maya and Houdini to use as a base for my overpaint in Photoshop.

The concept art above was made for the graduation short film EOS. For this piece a 3D layout was provided. I made a simple render using Houdini and did the overpaint on top in Photoshop.