Corfe Castle Matte Painting

Well its been a while since my last update due to a very hectic start to year 3 at Bournemouth University. I have assignments coming at me from all directions it seems, and here's the first of them.This has probably been my favorite project to undertake so far at Bournemouth, as it had a great balance between artistic abilities and technical know how, as well as being our first Photoshop based project and was taught by the excellent Adam Redford and Melania Foderitto. The brief was to create a photo-real matte painting in Photoshop and then bring it to life using camera projection in Nuke.

After about 11 aborted attempts to emulate overly epic matte paintings such as those by David Luong and Damien Mace and create a piece from scratch, I decided to learn to walk before running and work from a photographed backplate. After 2 trips to Winchester, 1 to Christchurch and 1 to Lyndurst I found Corfe Castle, a fantastic location to photograph a plate with my new Cannon 600D. Going in half term was perhaps not the best idea as the place was swarming with people and screaming children, but I managed to take enough decent photographs to work with. I decided to use the village square as the composition rather than the Castle itself  (which I added to the hill in the background) as it was the only really open area within the village (one of the draw backs of historical towns). I set to painting out various people, cars, and anything which would seem out of place for a period piece.

Here you can see the image I ended up with:

And here is the video of the projection, including a quick breakdown of the patching and projection process:




Corfe Castle Matte Painting from Gordon Marshall on Vimeo.

Finally had time to "finish" the still life I've been working on over Summer. Done in Maya, Mari, Nuke and Mental Ray. 

Ithaca - Maos BFX competition project

Hey guys last week my team (Maos) completed our entry for the BFX festival competition. This took a team of 6 of us 6 weeks about 12-16 hours a day (more in the last week), god knows how much coffee and "thats what she said" jokes. I'm really pleased with the overall visual quality of the finished piece. In this short Arnold Schwarzenegger stars as Odysseus in a Sci-fi reimagining of the Cyclops passage from Homer's Odyssey. Whilst other entries may have been more imaginative or esoteric, I personally feel we managed to achieve a much higher level of hyper-realism. Oh and of course none of them had Arnie!

On this piece I was lead texture artist and compositor, as well as the environmental modeler. (Oh I animated the flags as well :P). Will post some breakdowns at some point.

Bit of texturing

Quick texture test in advance of BFX competition. Done in Mari. Model by Dan Jack.

Heres a WIP that I'm working on at the moment over Summer. Just another still life, but I'm trying to do a better job on this one than I did on my Digital Imaging Techniques assignment at University this year. Working on my subsurface shaders and Mari texturing. Straight out of Maya render at the moment. No compositing at the moment. 

 

Just completed my 'specialist' project for my 2nd year at Bournemouth. I finally got to have a go at producing a Neil Roberts style painting (i.e. mostly rendered 3D assets painted over in Photoshop with a matte painting background). This was a really interesting project and took me a lot of hard work to produce. The workflow involved modelling an organic base mesh in maya and zbrush, then rigging it so that it was poseable. After rigging I modeled the armour in Maya, parenting it to the joints so that it would follow them. Then I used multiple duplicates of the model, posed them and positioned them into my composition (the composition was decided from researching traditional war paintings). Then following some basic hypershade texturing and lighting it was rendered out using mental ray, and painted over in photoshop. There is also a video breakdown of the photoshop workflow below. Considering this is my first attempt at this workflow I am very happy with the results (about 3 weeks work including write up):

 Image:

Breakdown:

Yay I got a "Highly Commended" result on CGStudent awards alongside my course mates Michal Rutkowski and Daniel Jack! http://www.cgstudentawards.com/winners/highly-commended