Fall Quarter 2012: Background Design & Layout

This class centered on working on background pieces to be used as backdrops for animation or real-life special effects based backgrounds for film.  Two approaches were used, both photo manipulation and then digital painting techniques to achieve a matte painting effect. 

 

Project 1:  Haunted House (photo manipulation)

For this project we had to take a photo of a new house and dirty it up and modify it in Photoshop so it looked haunted.

 

 

Project 2:  Midterm Project Floating city

We had to select an architectural style and turn it into a floating city via digital painting.  I chose a castle style and turned it into the scene above.  We had to render a sunset and night scene of the same floating city.

 Project 3:  Monk and waterfalls

For this project we followed a template to render a photo manipulation of a Monk stading before waterfalls and an ancient temple/city complex.  We had to blend many elements into the scene: monk, tree, steps, waterfalls, mountains and various photos of mosques to render the city portion.

Project 4:  Merman

For this project we had to use photo manipulation and a tutorial to create a scene of a Merman and fish.  This is all layered photography and filters to create the scene.

 

 Project 5:  Futuristic Lab

For this project we had to work from the Professor's sketch and create a futuristic laboratory as seen through a window.  This wan an exercise in digital painting.

 Final Project:  Underwater City

For this project we used photo manipulation to render an underwater scene again.  This time we had to render an underwater ruin with a modern city in the background.  The foreground was to be composed of a household item transformed into a submarine.  I used an electric knife as the base for the submarine and added various elements to make it more submarine looking.