Friday, February 5, 2010

Planet concept for possible matte

I'm not feeling very verbose at the moment (I'm working on a lot of things), so I'll just outline a few of my thoughts as bullet points:

  • Always wanted to do a matte painting of a planet. The opening shot of The Thing is my favorite.
  • I can't really consider this a full matte yet. The original painting is 4k, scaled to 2k, and then outputted here to my blog at 1k.
  • I would really love to composite a spaceship flying in on this, so that's why I left it pretty bare on the left side

4 comments:

Unknown said...

nice, very nice. I cheat on planet matte, I just apply a NASA picture as a texture onto a sphere. Problem is you loose something in the process. Yours looks way cooler than mine, well impressed.

Reminds me of the recent Superman Movie.

Painted Preppy said...

amazing!

Wayne Haag said...

I think your lighting direction vs atmos layer is off a bit. If the main light source was mostly rim/back lit, then you might see the light scattering 'around' the globe and see it on the shadow side. But you have top right hand lighting here (camera viewpoint)and rim lighting on the bottom left. Light scattering probably wouldn't make it all the way around the way you've described it here.

I'd also vary the terrain colours a little, drier vs tropical etc..

And dont forget the specular highlight off the ocean.

Otherwise good job mate!

Sean Thurlow said...

Not bad Matt for your first planet I say.

Now Wayne pretty much gave you a awesome critique I think in terms of things you could do to make the planet better and I see what he is saying with the lighting.

In terms of rim lighting I found this other space image you might want to take a look at here http://sirgerg.deviantart.com/art/Jewel-132770108

I'm pretty sure you have already but if you haven't spend some time browsing through the space art on deviantart. There is tons upon tons of that kind of art actually there and could give you some ideas for your image.

The main thing that struck me actually is the stars in your piece. Stars all vary in sizes and remember some of them can be brighter in certain spots. Right now it looks like you took a single scatter brush to the background. Try to vary it up some in there.

I like the idea of getting a ship in there. That will be a nice addition to this piece.

Good luck with the rest of the this, I'll keep my eyes out on it when you finish it.