Environmental Concepts - Mixing Matte-painting with 3D

To save time often instead of crating full 3d environments with every tree, hill, mountain textured in the background oten they combine photographic elements into the fray. Other mattepainters use the digital software to composite the photographic elements together rather than use the 3d software to create particular structures or objects.

Often artists create the environment concept in the following way foreground - 3d rendered, background - photomontage / mattepainting. Sometimes elements impossible to achieve wit photomontage in the backgrounds can even be added with 3d software.

Here is a selection of matte paintings by Wayne Haag, he implements a lot of 3d with photomontage. Often foreground buildings, vehicles and objects are created totally with 3d software and the rest with matte-painting techniques.

Leviathan and the art of keith Thompson

Leviathan takes place in an alternative history in world war 1, where steam punk weapons, vehicles and characters are common place. Especially useful research in relation to the collaborative project where we aim to implement a steam punk theme with a possibly unique take on it.

Link to Keith Thompsons website

Trailer for Leviathan Book Release:

Possible Ideas for Projects

Concept Art
Character/vehicular concepts - Photoshop/Corel
Environment Concepts - Mattepaintings/3d render
Scenario Concept illustrations - Photoshop/Corel/3d Render

~ Concept art for a fictional video game of a steam punk art style

3d rendered Environment
~ Different context; non video game related, possibly competition brief.

Collaborative Project

Diary onboard a steam punk airship

Random Concepts

Here is a selection of seemingly random but very interesting conceptual illustrations. I’ve collected various galleon airship illustrations because this year I have been aiming to design and illustrate one myself for reasons unknown to me.

Steam Punk

Further Environment Concepts + Matte-Painting!

3d software is ofcource not the only way of creating cocnept art, some artists go for a full digital painting or a mattepainting as shown below. Mattepaintings are essentialy photomontages mized with digital painting, it verys greatly between artists of how much is hand drawn gitially and how much is altered photographs. The two images below are primarily digitaly painted with some photographs merged in to add texture.





























Here is a classic example of a full mattepainting, it offers the oppurtunity to create an environement that could never exist is reality but at a photorealistic quality, more so than could ever be ahcieved with a 3d generated environment.
















Here is a link to his website with a in-depth look at the processes he took to create this matte-painting:

Video Game Concept Art

Video game concept art is also of interest to me, going through the various processes to formulate a character or vehicle is a very interesting and rewarding process.

Not only would this be an interesting project to test my skills of imagination but also it would help greatly in improving my anatomical drawing.

The two main forms of concept art in video games are character/vehicle concept, Environmental concepts and Scenario concept. Character and vehicle concepts tend to usually have the style of sketches and further developed and coloured designs over a whit background, sometimes with notes made by the artist pointing out important factors.

Scenario based Concept art
This form of video game concept art is aimed at showing characters and vehicle design in their appropriate context, such as in an environment to form a battle-scene. Sometimes these are shown to the game makers themselves, to push them further to attempt to match the quality/atmosphere on the concept in the game itself.

With this type of video game concept art style differ. Sometimes there simple digital speed paints (bottom right) similar to the character/vehicle concepts and other times their very in-depth 3d illustrations (bottom left).

It would be very interesting to embark on a project to design concept art for a fictional video game of my imagination. And try out all three forms of video game concept art, Time constraints would probably lead to only being able to achieve 1 or 2 of those aims however.

Half Life 2 Concept Art