Teaching at Matte Mentors

Hi Everyone,

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.

High Speed Clip Highlighting the Ancient Bridge Demo

Hope to see you there, and signup to our email list for future classes and seminars.

Thanks

Gaea Mountains – LOTR Inspired Concept Painting

I’ve been watching Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power and it got me wanting to create some mountains. I created this quick concept.

So, I opened up Gaea this weekend and did some quick mountains there. Gaea is great. Very intuitive and easy to use with it’s node based system.

Simple node setup

You basically keep adding nodes and moving sliders till you start getting something you like.

Gaea nodes

Once you get shapes then you can apply textures within it as well.

Gaea mountain with textures

You just export out your maps and geometry and bring it into your program of choice. I went into Maya to design my shot.

Maya layout

Here is a simple render using Arnold to test look mountain.

Maya render with Arnold

Once I got the placement of geometry (you can use height maps as another method) in Maya, I exported it all over to Clarisse. Here I added volumes of mist and clouds using VDBs.

Clarisse for final and adding volumes

Here is the final raw render.

Clarisse raw render

I then wanted to add some little character traversing the land, so I exported out a ranger archer character from Mixamo and placed in the scene.

Mixamo Character

Little bit of Photoshop retouching and painting for the final.

Final Quick Concept Painting

A quick little Lord of the Rings-ish Mountain concept painting, definitely not a finished painting but was fun to put together for a few hours.