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 2 of my Matte Painting for Animation class is starting July 16th. It will be 4 weeks working on an establishing shot of your own.

There’s still some spots left if you feel your ready to jump right in and work on your own shot.

Last week to sign up upcoming class: http://www.mattementors.com

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.

Next semester starts April 23rd: https://www.mattementors.com/

Here are some examples of the students work.

Just wrapped up my Winter Semester with Students for my Matte Painting for Animation: Stylized Worlds class.

Had a fabulous class of hardworking students!

Here are some select shots from a few of the students from this Winter Semester. I’ll share more work from the class in the coming weeks.

Spring and Summer semesters are coming up, take a look and see if you’d like to sign up!

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.

The current Animation Feature I’m working on just released it’s first trailer last week….enjoy!

It’s the story of the enchanted Madrigal family, who live in a magical house hidden in the mountains of Columbia. It is a visually vibrant movie with songs written by Lin-Manuel Miranda

Here are 2 of the released posters

I had the incredible honor again this year of being part of the 2021 VFX Graduation Projects for the Senior Projects at New3dge school.  This year again due to Covid we looked at the students work and met virtually. The school allowed us access to the students’ work, breakdowns, and face time with the groups.  The Senior Projects are a group of shorts that a small group of students (usually 5 to 6) work on as team replicating a mini pipeline as they execute a highly caliber of work. The students of VFX/Animation graduation projects for 2021 were just as impressive this year. They produced really outstanding quality all the while having to work remotely due to Covid. This is no small feat! So much great work and inspirational to see!

It was a great pleasure to interact with each team and talk about their projects and questions. New3dge school is doing a superb job teaching their students to be ready for professional careers in VFX, Animation and Games.

Unfortunately I can’t share the projects that the students worked on yet. The School has them submitted to various festivals. Once I am allowed I’ll share the works with links.

Just like last year, these shorts are worth checking out!