Digital Matte Painting & VFX (2018)

The matte painting in its final stages, completed using a combination of photos, adjustment layers and a flattened image of 3D statue models.

The layers in the Photoshop file were categorised into sections that were later exported as separate assets to be used in Nuke for a parallax effect (Plate, Sky, Foreground, Statues, Castle, Background, Mist etc.)

This is what the matte painting looked like before all the edits. The smaller image on the side was a reference of the look that I was initially going for.

This is a screenshot of the original moving plate (the actual asset was a 4K clip). The first thing we did was stabilise the footage using trackers and erase the people with the clone tool in Nuke.

Here is a screenshot of the node graph, colour coordinated to distinguish each group of assets. This particular section shows the image projections on cards.

This is what the 3D composition in Nuke looked like.

The image of the statue was projected onto the 3D model but due to the nature of this process, the leg of the statue was projected onto the shield.

To fix any "double-up" issues like the one above, we had to erase a few elements in the UV map.

These were the areas that were altered.