What Is Matte Painting for Cinema?

Learn the basic concepts for creating incredible movie scenes

Matte painting is the art behind realistic scenarios and backdrops in cinema. In the olden days, film sets were painted manually or using models. Thanks to digital technology, incredibly realistic backgrounds are created using an array of programs.

Koke Nunez (@kokenunez) is a Spanish digital artist, creator of fantastic worlds, and amazing landscapes. He specializes in conceptual art and matte painting and has worked in the film industry for clients such as Warner Chappel Music, Two Steps From Hell, Audiomachine, and Dos Brains.

Koke explains to us the basic concepts of matte painting:

What is matte painting?

Matte painting is a digital technique that creates non-existent scenarios to offer the viewer a realistic and credible scene. It is a painted visual representation used to recreate landscapes or settings in a filmed scene, such as a movie, video, or television production.

Through the superimposition of images, illustrations, or videos, the scene is integrated and completed, allowing filmmakers to create the illusion of an environment that is not present at the filming location.

History

This process was originally used in photography and illustration. It has evolved a lot, and in its digital form, it is one of the most used techniques in the VFX industry.
Originally glass panels were painted manually in oil or superimposed in one shot to create these non-existent sets.

Some of the first movies that used this technique were King Kong in the 1930s, and Citizen Kane, in the 1940s. Star Wars, ET, and The Lord of the Rings are movies that feature outstanding use of matte painting in their productions.

Industrial Light and Magic

One of the most famous VFX studios, Industrial Light and Magic, was founded by George Lucas when he started filming Star Wars in 1975. The studio set the standard for visual effects, winning 15 Best Visual Effects Oscars and many other awards over the years while creating some of the most stunning images in cinema's history.

Chris Evans and Mike Pangrazio are some of the most famous matte painters to have worked there, spending months creating scenes with an incredible level of detail, either painting on glass or canvas.

In 1985, Chris Evans also created the first digital matte shot, to complement a computer animation graphic for the Young Sherlock Holmes feature.

A digital revolution

Although hand-painted matte painting continued to exist over the years (for example, in 1997, Evans hand-painted the rescuing ship in James Cameron's Titanic), digital imaging took over the industry.

Koke takes us through the most popular 2D and 3D programs to create a matte painting, from the obvious Photoshop to 3D software like Maya, or Nuke to create projections on 3D planes. Other programs used in this field are World Creator, and Terragen used to create terrain. Zbrush is used to create 3d modeling.
For post-production, the ever-popular After Effects, and rendering engines such as Octane Render, Redshift, or VRay are used.

Matte painters' skills

As a general rule, a matte painter must be skilled in photography and photo manipulation, use of 3D, and know rendering, texturing, and compositing. Naturally, they must also know about light, perspective, shadows, scales, and be skilled in digital illustration.
As technology moves forward, a matte painting artist must keep up to date with all new software.

There are different types of matte painters, depending on what they specialize in: a 2D matte painter receives plates of recorded material and 3D modeling and works on retouching those digitally. A 3D matte painter's job is more comprehensive, in that they can also work the 3D modeling, texturing, and rendering before sending it to post-production. Some all-rounders can also undertake post-production tasks, for example, special effects, and camera work and compositing.

If you'd like to learn more about this incredible art, and see your own realistic matte painting come alive, sign up to Koke Nunez's course Matte Painting for Cinema.

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