PHOTO-BASHING

Well hello! My name is Carey and today we’re gonna run through some quick matte painting and compositing techniques you can use to give your work just a little extra of that jjjjjuice!

So we’ve been lookin at examples of work submitted for this Division05 course, the Visual Design Lab. There’s a community for the lab where we post work from each its challenges, and this time we’re lookin at some rad stuff done by Viktor Blinnikov, for the 5th challenge where you can make anything you like, and any way you like, but while trying to convey a general theme in a specific way. For his first theme, he chose “wilderness”. And I thought it’d be cool to work with this because, check this out, this is a pretty awesome idea, and it’s interesting partly because he’s represented wilderness in these very flat, vector graphic kinds of forms.

All of the shapes are really chunky, and look like they’re probably auto-traced in illustrator from low-resolution photos. Combine that with the really flat colors, and it just ever so slightly feels like 16-bit video game graphics or something. The resolution is higher in some places [moon], and lower in others [clouds], so yeah, the reference isn’t super strong. But, hard edges, chunky shapes, flat color and some banding, you see what I’m gettin at. And I don’t know if it works all that well, but that’s not a failure on Viktor’s part, this is a really interesting take on the wilderness theme. The idea is really awesome! And he’s no slouch, he’s done some beautiful stuff that’s sorta similar but did it using different techniques, and was brave enough here to try something he’s never tried before, which is great. I think the elements here are just sort of low quality readymade photoshop brushes, and vector shapes you get in those cheap design symbol packs that have a ton of useless shit in them. 😀 White guy punches a butterfly… super useful. They’re good for some things, but it can be kinda hard to elevate this stuff from the garbage condition it usually comes in.

So what I want to do is show you how simple it can be to use some photo-bashing and compositing techniques with real imagery to inject some life into stuff like this, and really into just about anything you make. So I spent maybe 30 minutes on google images grabbing stuff that I thought I might be able to plug into Viktor’s image. We’re not gonna use all of it, but you never know what might end up being useful, and it’s better to grab it while you’re searching than to look for it again and not be able to find it. So we’ve got some different clouds and skies to try, some different kinds of mountains… some rocky, some forested, which should come in handy… it doesn’t all have to be stylized stuff, so we got some basic trees, and… I think we’ll just start there.

There’s a gradient over the top here and I’m gonna yank that out to give us a bit more contrast between the foreground and the background because we’re gonna put some things in the foreground that will brighten it up a touch, and busy it up considerably. This tree already came with a transparent background, which is great because I want to use its silhouette instead of this crime against nature. Darkened way down using a levels adjustment layer, the silhouette of that is already 10x nicer. Maybe even 11x nicer! We’re winning already! So I’m gonna use it for all of these, because… obviously. And the second cool thing about using a real image here is that unlike the flat photoshop shape, this tree has its own internal detail, and I can just very subtly reveal that by painting it back in with a soft brush. Out at the tips there’s a little bit of the white fringing left over that we’ll take care of later, but you can see how revealing some of that internal detail gives it just a hint of that tree texture, and in a way that looks like a dim light is hitting it. I use that trick a lot.

And then an even simpler photo-bashing trick is bringing an image like this in, and just painting part of it in, like a fill. We’ll add stuff on top of it, so for right now, I’m kind of just laying it in to get a sense of where I might want stuff. Like, this… I grabbed this just to fill the tree trunk that this guy is standing on, but I think the shape of this real trunk is more interesting, so I’ll just cut it out real quick… doesn’t have to be perfect, it just needs to be nice and crisp, and feel like a tree trunk. That shape’s a little nicer!

Of course, the lighting in that image is way brighter than our scene, so I’m gonna darken it up so that it looks more like it’s dimly illuminated. And luckily it already looks like the light on it is from the right, leaving it mostly in shadow on the left. The lighting in Viktor’s image is actually really ambient and diffuse, it’s not coming from a particular direction, so it probably wouldn’t hit the stump like this but I’m gonna make that lighting choice for now anyway, and I’ll try to keep it consistently coming from the right throughout.

Like, I’m gonna use some of this mossy ground texture from the same image, and paint it in on the left, where the light might be hitting more. Since I’m using photoshop, all that takes is adding a layer mask to it, and inverting that layer mask, so everything in the image is transparent. Now I can just grab a soft brush again, dial the flow down to almost nothing, and gently bring the image back in by painting white in that mask. There are different ways to bash photos into your work, and this one is good when you’re mostly borrowing the texture of something, like the texture of these mosses.

Sometimes it’s even easier than that, though. These little hills in the background are their own layer, so I can constrain this image to that layer, set it to “overlay” and just find a spot for it to sit where it makes sense. All I have to do is keep in mind that I’ve decided the light is generally coming more from the right. Look at that, already pretty great. And that took, what, 15 seconds? It’s not a distracting amount of detail, but it’s enough to give that shape some character, and a little bit more depth than it had.

And I’m basically gonna do that for each of the shapes that I think could do with some more character, or some indication of lighting. Using that masking technique to paint appropriate images in certain areas, and sometimes just blasting it in there and dialing it down so it’s not crazy distracting. Mostly looking to add little lighting touches, that illuminate some of the character of these elements. But another thing I’m looking to do is to add depth by making it more and more apparent which of these things are in front of which others. Adding these mist layers is appropriate to the scene, because I’m imagining this is early morning, so I’m using it like a ground fog, to create the appearance of distance between some of these layers. Layering it between things in the foreground, and the things further off in the distance. This is a trick that a lot of concept designers and matte painters will use for creating environments, but you can use it for aaaaall sorts of things, as long as you do it subtly. It works really well, and does so by creating local value contrast, which is something we talk about in the design lab, and Viktor has already built in some of that using gradients to create this kind of haze, and using value and saturation to delineate the silhouettes of each of these elements as they recede into the distance.

Now I’m gonna replace these super nasty clouds, which is easy because with a basic cloud image like this, you can just suck that blue out to get it as dark as possible, drop it in and set it to “screen”, and you’re pretty much good to go. Just mask out those hard edges a bit. And since we’re making things slightly more photorealistic, gotta bring this dark moon in line with everything else, lighting-wise. I’m gonna keep the composition and the idea of Viktor’s frame basically the same, but decisions like that are gonna make it feel just a little bit different. You can see how that’s already happening. It’s still really graphic, but at the same time it also feels more and more photographic. And the point isn’t that photographic is somehow better, it’s not, it’s just a choice. The point is that you can add little touches like this to things you’ve illustrated, or to things you’re designing to be animated, or you can incorporate it into 3d renders, and it gives all of those things that little something extra.

And picking a good image or a good texture to use really comes down to signifiers, like we talked about in this first design crit. This mountain is a great place to add some detail, but obviously I wouldn’t overlay just like… a random manicured grass texture on it, because that’s stupid and ugly. Clearly, we need something the size of a mountain, but not just some rocky, barren mountain either, because our mountain silhouette is of a mountain covered in trees. So it made sense to spend an extra minute to find an image that has a hillside that’s heavily forested, and is shot at a distance, so the trees are small, and there are some peaks and valleys to give it some variation. Works really well.

Similarly, I’m thinking this central figure is kind of like… the king of the forest, because he’s got this sort of crown, which is cool. But he’s a mysterious, kind of dark character, so I question whether this headpiece or crown is right for that character. Like, it does look like a headdress made of sticks and plants, which is a really fitting idea, it’s pretty smart, but maybe it’s not the right headdress made of sticks and plants, y’know? It’s a really important part of the image because it tells us a lot about this main character, but maybe that particular element is a little, I dunno, ostentatious for a guy with scraggly-ass branch wings, who’s standing on a dead stump. What if instead he just has some short branches that look like horns growing out of his head. Something a little more bestial than a full headpiece. I mean, some of this stuff can get kind of subjective, but it’s not insignificant. He’s the focus of the image, and those particular details tell us a lot about him, so it’s pretty important. Now, whether you like one more than the other is totally up to you. Or there might be something altogether different that you think would be cooler, but the point is that it’s important to think about why one might be more interesting or more appropriate or more telling than another, so that you can make that decision intentionally, and not arbitrarily, especially with something that tells your viewer so much about what’s going on.

By contrast, these clothing textures are way less important. I’m really just using them to fake like he’s got some faint lighting on his right side, in keeping with everything else. So it doesn’t matter as much what the actual textures are, but it still matters. Whereever you’re adding textures, you’re adding detail, so you’re adding meaning, however slight, so choose textures that convey additional meaning. Same with this raven. The silhouette is really telling you most of what you need to know, and I just want a touch of lighting on the right side, but it still makes sense to use an image of a raven. And why is it that we’re always working with… what is this, the ravens and roots series?!

I’m just gonna do some quick overlays: a gradient to brighten up the area around our guy, and create a little more variation in value across the frame. And because this sky is still mostly a flat color, just a tiny bit of grit to further break that up and give it some tactility. Super faint color variation here in the center too. These sorts of things just breathe a little bit of extra life into the frame, and they’re really subtle, but they add up. I’ll do some simple fixes to a few things that I maybe didn’t take quite far enough the first time around, and then introduce a bit stronger color variation into the sky with an actual image of a sunrise, and I think that’s lookin pretty good!

This took a few hours, but without even changing the basic composition, you can see the difference from where we started. The overall effect of doing this is slightly more photoreal, so you can choose how much of that you want, vs how graphic or clean you want it, because one isn’t necessarily better than the other. Like, this feels like it has a richer story, but this one has that slight 16-bit reference that might be cool for certain purposes if it were developed more. And you have to decide what’s going to work best for each individual project. But again, I find that in a lot of cases, just applying some small touches, like real-world textures or a little bit of lighting, or adding layers between elements to help delineate them and create some depth between them… all of those techniques work more often than not. How you use them matters, and that comes down to some deeper issues that we work on in the design lab, so check that out, but even if you’re just wingin it, take a shot at this and give your stuff some extra detail and character with these basic matte painting and compositing techniques. They’re really fun! It’s really cool to take a design you’re already feeling good about and to be able to push it even farther.

So thanks to Viktor. This is a really cool idea. Really evocative. Check out his other work in the description, he’s done a bunch of cool stuff. Let me know in the comments what you’d like to learn about next. And give photo-bashing a shot! It’s fun! See you soon!