Beowulf Worlds Created Using Matte Painting In CINEMA 4D

Artists at Sony Pictures Imageworks once again proved that short deadlines and hefty digital scenes that would break a normal pipeline were putty in their hands, thanks to stable tools such as MAXON's CINEMA 4D.a

The gifted Matte Painters at Imageworks picked up more than their fair share of the Beowulf production load with ease, with the help of an incredible pool of talent and their artist-friendly pipeline. This enviable pipeline featured a toolset of state-of-the-art applications, including Adobe's After Effects and Photoshop working in concert with CINEMA 4D.




"Late in the production it was decided that the matte department would handle almost all the external environments for Beowulf." says Lead Matte Painter, Steve Matson of Sony Pictures Imageworks. This was a huge task, consisting of around 350 shots with only about six months left in production.

"We have been developing an artist-friendly pipeline for some time now. This really paid off when we had to ramp up our team from about five painters to up to twelve in a very short time. I looked for painters with strong artistic talent and teamed them up with someone who knew the technical side. I'd rather have a great painter and teach him the tech stuff than other way round. A lot of the team hadn't used our projection tools before, but we got them up and running quickly. Our pipeline allows us to spend about 15% of the time setting up the shot for projections and 85% painting."

"On a shot-by-shot basis it was necessary for us to do a lot of concept work in the matte department. We would start with 3D elements from layout that were unlit and paint a rough lighting sketch. The sketches played a huge role in setting the mood for the shot, even in shots that didn't require matte painting. This concept work would be output through the shot camera in CINEMA 4D. This was a great way for the lighters to get started lighting the shot and render their foreground elements right over top of our background. It is a quick way to get shots in front of the VFX supervisor and director, so we could ask questions like, Ôis the sunlight going to be obscured by clouds here?' Later, this concept painting would be replaced with a final matte painting and the lighting would match perfectly".

"We used huge projections that really pushed CINEMA 4D," says Matson. Some paintings needed to cover a full 360°. We would split them into 2 - a right and left hemisphere, often at 16k each. To handle these wide angles we used a camera array of fifteen to thirty cameras, projecting a small slice at 5-20° increments. We also needed to create additional multiple projection cameras to cover the foreground and mid-ground terrain. All within the one project. I don't think we could have done that in any other 3D package with the same ease. CINEMA 4D really handled it well.

"After Effects was used to add movement to our matte paintings. We animated moving skies, clouds, fog, and water effects. We used these 2D animation techniques wherever possible as it proved to be very cost-effective. It also enables us to maintain the integrity of the original matte painting because After Effects composites the layers exactly the same way as Photoshop does."

"Another challenge we had was creating ocean shots, for example Beowulf's landing on the beach. Budgetary restraints made it prohibitively expensive to create waves in CG on all those shots," Matson continues. "I started by laying out a couple of shots in Photoshop and then went out to Hermosa Beach and shot waves and the beach in HD. We then integrated the footage with the Photoshop paintings using After Effects". The comp was then piped into CINEMA 4D and projected onto scene geometry imported from Maya. "Almost everything we produced was output by CINEMA 4D as a rendered, finished background plate. The waves ended up looking great and fit in well with the look of the film."



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