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Film & TV · MS elective · 3 credit hours · 16 sessions

Digital Sets & Set Extensions

” The best visual effects are the ones you never notice.” This course covers the art of the Matte Painter and Environment Generalist. Students will learn to seamlessly extend limited physical sets (Green Screen plates) into vast digital worlds. The curriculum covers Camera Projection (Mapping), 2.5D compositing, and “Photobashing” techniques to create hyper-realistic environments that hold up to camera movement.

§ 01 By the end you can
  1. Master the "Camera Projection" (2.5D) workflow in Nuke or Maya
  2. Execute "Set Extension" techniques to expand physical green screen sets
  3. Understand "Parallax" and how to cheat depth in digital environments
  4. Utilize "Photobashing" to create high-resolution matte paintings quickly
  5. Match digital lighting and lens artifacts (grain/distortion) to live-action footage
§ 02 Sixteen sessions

The whole semester.

  1. 01The Invisible Art: History of Matte Painting
  2. 02Perspective & Vanishing Points
  3. 03Photobashing: Composition & Value Structure
  4. 04The Clean Plate: Removing Rigs & Wires
  5. 05Camera Tracking: Solving the Shot
  6. 06Introduction to Camera Mapping (Projection)
  7. 07Modeling Proxy Geometry for Projection
  8. 08 · MidtermMidterm Examination
  9. 09Camera Projection II: Complex Geometry
  10. 10The 2.5D Workflow in Nuke/After Effects
  11. 11Set Extension: Blending Real & Digital
  12. 12Atmospherics: Fog, Haze, & Depth
  13. 13Relighting 2D Elements for 3D
  14. 14Integrating 3D Assets into Matte Paintings
  15. 15Final Polish: Grain, Lens Distortion, & LUTs
  16. 16Final Project: The Cinematic Set Extension

Midterm around session 8. Final project briefed at session 8 or 9 and developed in stages until the juries.

§ 03 Final project

Final Project: The Cinematic Set Extension

How it’s judged

Recommended reading
  1. The Digital Matte Painting Handbook by David B. Mattingly
  2. Matte Painting 2 by Paul Hellard
  3. Digital Compositing for Film and Video by Steve Wright
  4. The Invisible Art: The Legends of Movie Matte Painting by Craig Barron
  5. Nuke 101: Professional Compositing and Visual Effects by Ron Ganbar
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