Booleans Are Good

Watching the GroBototomodo videos convinced me to upgrade my GroBoto to Version 3. So booleans are not a bad word anymore it seems? It only took what... 20 years?

A Pretty Good Matte Painting Book

I've always been a fan of matte painters since seeing Forbidden Planet as a kid. I never thought I would be able to do matte paintings myself since the eye is very critical about such things. The Ballistic Publishing books on the subject that I've bought are cool to look through, but they don't go into every detail about how the images were created. The books only have enough pages to show the many finished scenes from the many artists that they picked from.



But finally! Yey! Sybex has put out a book by David Mattingly titled The Digital Matte Painting Handbook. The book puts you to work right away rather than leaving you lounge around by the coffee table. It reminds me of the olden days when I sat at a desk and did work in an art class. Maybe they still have art classes like that in school? I have no idea, since all I see now are people glued to their iPhones when I step outside.



I will admit though that I do not have any of the software that the author (teacher) uses. I'm just a 3D hobby person. But I do have an old version of Photoshop that can do layers, which is really what matte painting is all about. And I have enough 3D modeling and rendering software (just not Maya 2011) that can do camera projection. I don't have After Effects. But I'm not trying to do any animation or camera movement. My plan is to just do simple static matte paintings like those used in Forbidden Planet. Hey, I'm old school.



DVD fans will love the fact that the book comes with a DVD with demo workshops for the chapter lessons along with file/image/QT content. My Photoshop CS2 read the Photoshop CS5 files just fine so I could browse through them to look at the various layers in each scene discussed in the book.



It's about time a book like this has been published. Some warnings though. Knowledge of Photoshop is a must. And an artpad is recommended for doing the painting parts. But if you're like me though, you learned how to paint with a mouse in the mid '80s.

Back when airships were fast

Switched back to landscape using a 50mm lens. Gave the airship a slight steampunk material.

What else can I age?

I love FotoSketcher! Here is my mine elevator with a Rowan tree from Martin Frost.























Here's another view with even more aging.























Finished this view by adding a hill and more plants.



























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ADDED:

This render shows the scene, minus 99% of the haze.





















And this scene was shot early the next morning (funny, the same clouds were still there. Damn my playing God with nature!).



You can see the bare naked hill texture better in these two Vue renders. No postwork done on either.













I had to age this one though. Could not be helped.





















Could not be helped with this one either.













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ADDED:
Andrew Finnie mentioned some Xero-Graphics plugins to me. So I've been trying them out. This one kind of has an old '50s magazine photo look to it.

And here is a "photo" with a restored look to it, using both the Xero-Graphics and FotoSketcher filters.

Now in 35mm

Playing with the camera framing.

From another vue

I'm guessing the dirigible docks to the top of the building to let people on/off? All I have are a couple of postcards to go by. And I'm thinking that there was some altering done to them using a mainframe of some kind.

Ok. I'll tell you the truth.

This is another view of an alternate Earth history where Nazis rule Europe in 1950.

The 30-year Great War has ended, and Germany has allied with the Confederate States of America. The CSA hopes to use the German's newly developed atomic bomb against its old enemy to the North, the United States of America. But the USA has an atomic bomb of their own.

Alternate Earth History in Real 2D

A final shot. It was FotoSketched all to hell and back. My postwork of choice.

Quickly threw together a domed building using Hexagon 1.21 for this "final?" scene. Everything else was modeled in Hexagon 1.21. Textured in Carrara Pro 5.1, 3D-Coat 3.5.21, and Vue. Rendered in Vue 9.5 Infinite on my classic Windows XP 32-bit single core Pentium IV home-built.

How big is big really?

Just a test to see what kind of scale I could get using 70mm film. I wanted to add arcologies in the background because that is what I grew up with.

The best free software in town (maybe this year)

This cannot be stated enough. Download your free copy of FotoSketcher. Just do it.

Concept drawings, better late than...

I thought I'd make some concept drawings "after" already making a model. Since I skipped this step before, I thought doing it now would help me to see what was needed still for the design.




I kid. I did do some pencil drawings of this vessel on paper first before starting the modeling process. But they were super vague. My use of white space is atrocious! Not even worth their scanning for the Interweb.