One of the things I enjoy the most is matte painting. Mattes are a huge time saving allowing us to skip modeling and texturing job, specially in shots like this, where the characters just pass by with no interaction with the environment.

The technique we use to create this paintings is start with a rough 3D scene to get some idea of shadows and volume and then paint over that in layers using a combination of photographic references and plain painting.

When the painting is done, we decompose it into textures and camera map them onto low-poly geometry to create an interesting “3D painting” look… but that we’ll leave it for later

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