The Art Of Tiberius Viris

What is matte painting?

Answer: Digital Matte Painting combines digital painting, photo manipulation and 3D in order to create "virtual sets" that are otherwise hard, if not impossible (and nevertheless not cost effective), to find in the real world. Traditional matte painting was developed initially for the movies and was done optically, by painting on top of a piece of glass to be composited with the original footage, but nowadays, matte painting is done in computers with the use of a tablet as a drawing device and 3d software.
Matte Painted scenes are used widely for any kind of application that requires a virtual set, but, of course, movies are still the ones who use it the most. The goal here is to produce realistic environments (sets) where actors can perform as if they were there.

How is it done? Basically, in modern movies, the actors are performing on a small area called “active set” or “platform”. This can be a studio room (like the weather forecasts which are filmed against a blue/green background), an outside platform or even a real environment. It’s then the job of the matte painter to change everything around them and to make it blend with the active set. Matte Painting can be used to create entire new sets, or to extend portions of an existing set; It became a true trend of the new century and it has a bright future, together with the relatively new 2.5D and 3D compositing techniques.