Well, our 100 Year Anniversary Animated Film is out now. I had a wonderful time working on this film with our amazing Set Extension team along with our fabulous Set Extension Supervisor, Suki Lee.
Check out Wish is theaters, there are tons of Easter Eggs referencing many many of our films.
Here are a couple shots I worked on that have been used in our Marketing campaigns.
Enjoy!
Check out Matte Mentors for my upcoming classes! New semesters starting in January!!
We have a Black Friday coupon that’s good til 12/02!
I had some amazing students as we focused on completing a full one-off shot over the past 4 weeks. The students chose their own idea to take from concept to completion. Since it was such a compressed timeline not all of their pieces are finished but everyone did an amazing job!!
If anyone is interested in our courses at Matte Mentors, we now offer 2 versions of classes; Interactive group sessions and Pre-recorded Content only. There are also COMBO classes offering discounts.
Class begins July 16th! I will work with you on your own shot for 4 weeks. We will build it up from concept to final utilizing the same techniques you see here. Sign up now!
Look for Matte Mentors at this fall’s LightBox Expo as well! Chat with Instructor, Eric Bouffard at their booth.
So AI is huge in the news these days, and Adobe has launched a new BETA Photoshop that has some elements utilizing it’s AI, one of which is the “Generative Fill”. I messed with it a little over the weekend.
Part of my Matte Painting for Animation class, I go over doing quick digital paintings from photos. It’s a great exercise for studying an image and quickly boiling down it’s essence. It’s not an exercise to noodle the painting but quickly execute it in broad strokes.
Very excited to announce the latest shows from Disney Animation Studios, that I had the honor to work on: Strange World, which is releasing Nov 23rd, and Zootopia+, which is now available on Disney+.
Here are some of the newest Trailers for Strange World and Zootopia+
Some of my shots from the trailers so far…
Hope you enjoyed the clips! Make sure to see Strange World on November 23rd!
If you are interested in Matte Painting, check out my courses atMatte Mentors!
I just wanted to announce that I am teaching at the site Matte Mentors
The new class on Matte Painting for Animation will start on January 8th, 2023. You can pre-order it now to reserve your spot. It will be an 8 week course with weekly live interactive Zoom sessions and individual critiques on everyone’s work. So if you are interested in learning Matte Painting for the Animation industry come check it out.
I also have a FREE course if you’d like to get a taste of what I will be teaching. This course is Ancient Bridge and is available for download now.
Hope to see you there, and signup to our email list for future classes and seminars.
I recently had the pleasure of completing a virtual lecture and demo at Escena, school for an animation and concept design school in Mexico City. The students were wonderful and engaging. Here is the environment demonstration I created for them showing a little bit of my process.
For this Demo, I utilized the following software: Photoshop, Maya, Clarisse and Gaea.
I’ve been wrapped up in all things Tolkien of late and I remembered some concept sketches from Jeremy Bennett that I loved from the Peter Jackson Lord of the Rings movies and some stills from the new Amazon show, The Rings of Power.
To make things move quicker I utilized assets I have from Kitbash 3d, The Ancients.
I use Maya as my go to place to do Layout and Preliminary lighting. I created some simple hills and mountains using Maya’s sclupting tools. Bringing in some of the Ancient models. I used Arnold lights and shaders since I can replicate the same look in Clarisse afterwards.
Now, I want to swap out my rough hills with some better geometry. You can use do this multiple ways, import into Zbrush and high res my hills or use heightfield terrains. I went with the Heightfield route and used Gaea.
I made about four different landscape elements and then did a texture pass on them inside of Gaea.
I brought in these assets into Maya and matched them to my Layout and adjusted the lighting a little.
Instead of rocky terrain look I wanted to have some vegetation so I exported out my files into Clarisse. I moved the light around and added a simple water shader.
I brought in some grass elements and scattered them on the landscapes.
While in Clarisse I figured I’d bring in some VDBs for volumes of mist and clouds.
For the finishing touches I rendered out passes and painted the remaining details in Photoshop. I can do more nuances very quickly here. This is the final image.
Hope you enjoyed my little breakdown of my workflow on this piece.
Oh, if you noticed the logo, “Matte Mentors” on my images I will be teaching a new Matte Painting class through that site starting in January. Sign up to our newsletter for more information.