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Matte Painting is a technical-artistical activity dedicated to the production of digital backgrounds for the production design of films, videogames, illustrations.
The Matte Painting consists for the most of digital painting techniques and for the rest the use of 3D modeling and CG rendering together with digital compositing and layering.
The execution speed and the correspondence to the art-direction are of paramount importance. In the case of photorealistic backgrounds, live footage or photographies can be used, adapted to the final result through '''photo re-touching" techniques"
The Matte Painting techniques has been used since many years in the filmmaking industry. It's a painting with transparent properties which in the past was made with oil painting colors on glass plates positioned on top of film frames. Of course today this is obsolete and everything is done digitally: that is why we usually refer to it as "Digital Matte Painting".
The principle is the same but with methods and tools much more efficient and powerful. Compositing software tools as Adobe Photoshop are usually the most important ones along with high-sensitivity graphic tablets and high-resolution scanners and photo-cameras.
To get a professional results is often needed to assemble together a great amount of photographies and images which through re-touching and image processing as well as painting will recreate the wanted subject.
Why don't we just shoot a good photography to be set as the background, then?
Often times the film director or the Director of Photography want sceneries expensive or impossible to be found (think about the locations for the "Lord of The Rings" trilogy of Peter Jackson)
Evan Shipard
They are called Matte Painters or Digital Matte Painters