Final Matte Painting

This project I did by taking a picture of downtown Chicago and than manipulating it to look like an abandoned city covered in sand. I did this by creating a mask on the background and than masking over the things I didn't want to show. Than I layered other images i created using custom brushes under it to incorporate them in the scene. I then used color adjustment, layer styles and blending modes to make the patch-work picture look like everything belonged together. The brushes I created were vines, fog, sand, tumbleweeds and wind. The texture I created for this level concept involved the sand which would be the floor of the level.

Texture brick wall

For this project I had to make a texture for a brick wall that was tillable. First I picked a non-tiled wall from the CG textures site, and than brought that into photoshop. From there I copy and pasted half of the picture over and flipped it making sure to match up the seams so that none of them showed. I then color corrected it with some color balance and levels; and than added in shadowing around bricks that stuck out more than others. I merged and saved this to be my diffuse map, next I started on my specular map. I flattened the image down and added a black & white adjustment filter to it. I than further adjusted it with curves to make the shadows and light pop more with in the image.

Content Aware Brush

For this project, I was to remove as many people as possible from the picture by using only the healing spot brush and the content aware feature. I did this by activating the healing spot brush, selecting content aware from the overhead menu. Then I slowly painted over the people in the picture, carefully selecting each body part and painting it out. I did this to the baseball players, and the bleachers at the bottom of the picture.

Day to Night Project

For this project I turned day in to night. The picture had people in it at first so I used the stamp tool to clone them out. Then I made a new layer, made the whole thing one color, and then switched the layer to overlay. I then selected the sky with the color picker, and  added in another layer were i painted in the sky and changed it to overlay. Finally I added stars by picking a star brush, changing the setting on it to scatter and change shape often and painted in the sky. 

Meteor Strike Matte

My goal for this project was to create a scene where a city is being hit by meteors. I was to create debris and realistic impacts and smoke, using given brushes. I downloaded the brushes and replaced the set I had for those. I then created a few smoke streams ranging from different shades of gray to create depth. I also added smoke stacks around the buildings and later, after cutting large pieces of the buildings off and moving them off the side a bit, I painted in fire bursts coming from inside and around the impact holes. The fire brushes were borrowed from Chris, who found them on a web site that hosted photoshop brushes. I edited this brush preset to scatter it often and mix up the colors so it looks more like wild lively fire. I later went back and painted in debris chunks, by using a provided brush and using the eyedropper to get the color of the building I wanted debris flying out of. Finally, I touched up the color of the overall image, darkening up the skies, and adding in more red and orange tone and highlights. To make the overall appearance seem as though this took place sometime in the afternoon.

Tidal Wave Scene

For this project I had to create a scene with 3 different images. I cut them all out and arranged then and than I used adjustment layers to tweak all the colors and make it appear as one scene. I also gave the picture a bit of an afternoon light to it.

Matte Painting 1

For this project my goal was to create a matte painting with three separate images. So I began my project by cutting out the sections I wanted and arranging them in one canvas. I then used the adjustment layers to color correct each to give the whole scene a solid appearance. I then grouped my picture pieces together and began painting over it on another layer, by using the eyedropper and a fine pointed paint brush that was also soft. Dot by dot I filled in the sky and then the hiker. I than painted over the rock with a custom brush I had made, and I tweaked its appearance in the preset brush manager.  Finally I tried to finish the background with the canyon but I ran out of time, I was planning on using the first technique I had used on the sky to fill in the remaining portion.