Peasant Village, Visual effects in live action
Peasant Village - Shot 1 Matte Painting
Yesterday I worked on the matte painting for the mountain where you can see the village. I began with doing some tests on the scale of the matte painting. On my first tests I made the the details too large and it looked like a miniature village. Now I think I’ve got a pretty good scale on things, but I’m not a matte painter so please tell me if I should change something.
Because of the large camera movement in this shot I needed a really high resolution matte painting, but it was only near the village I needed that resolution. So I got the idea of layering the camera projections in a layered texture. I began testing with some simple textures but I couldn’t get it to work. I couldn’t get the alpha to work on the top layer in the layered texture so I only saw the top layer with black around it. After a lot of testing and frustration I found the solution.
The top layer texture file need an alpha embedded and you have to pipe it through a duplicate of the projection node (see image below). Also the alpha can’t be all white(100 opaque) because then it isn’t recognized and maya will instead use the luminance as an alpha. You have to have some black in the alpha channel to make it work.
So now I have two textures at 4000x2250. One that covers the hole mountain and one that covers the mountains near the village. I’ll see if I need some more detail when I bring the real houses to the scene. Around the houses I’m gonna have some separate meshes for the snow and use the snow shader.
All the other mountains in the background will be simple cards in Nuke. I will transfer the camera animation to Nuke, that way I can easily bring stuff into the shot.
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