Matte Painting in Games

[Music] my name is pck rander I'm a senior concept artist I worked in the games industry and entertainment industry as a whole for 12 years and I started out working in small Studios and eventually I worked up myself up to bigger AAA Studios as a more more specialist I'm currently at remedy entertainment and I've always been a big fan of Vistas in games you know those moments where you just like take a moment and enjoy the view and get transported into another world and uh creating those kind of moments have been a driving force in my concept art career and then trying to get those moments into every single game that I work on but there's uh very little information on how to create those Vistas and those moments so today I'm

going to present my Approach focused on math painting and there are many other techniques different for math painting that you can use and different workflows you can use to create large Vistas but this is like another tool that that you can have in your in your toolbox so what you see here what you see here is the result that we're going for and uh the example that I'm going to be showing today is not connected to any remedy projects current or future it's just made for this talk so first I'm going to cover the background and The Core Concepts of a mat painting and uh in my view the different components you need to pay attention to is the camera placement the geometry placement and where the math painting lives in the world then I'm going to go through a quick creation process where we create the example that I just showed you guys so math painting has a long history

from painting on glass back in the day to digital math painting and slowly evolving into full 3d environments and according to Wikipedia and Ma painting is a representation of a landscape set to a distant location that allows filmmakers to create an illusion of an environment that is not present at the filming location for me it's a way to show a larger world and to inform the player of like the bigger universe that they're a part of and it's usually with Way Beyond the scope of a game production to create spectacles like that that are actually playable so I find that it's a technique that is as powerful in games as it is in movies and just like in movies P mat paintings and Vistas help you show the world outside of the game Space you might be walking on a very constricted Street area but a matte painting and a good Vista gives you the feeling that

you're in a epic Hive City for example this in this picture it's also a very important part of creating a suspension of disbelief for the player making sure that they buy into the entire story and the premise of the game so the easiest way to describe a matte painting in a game is that it's an texture with Bai and Lighting on a low poly geometry with an unle Shader and texture is actually the big limiting factor of a matte painting in games you can push as much detail as you can possibly get into that texture but the cost of a matte painting is generally extremely cheap and performant and the actual virtue of this technique that is a simple geometry and just the texture and unle Shader makes the iteration time and the creation time extremely fast so when it comes to creating our math painting as said there are a couple of elements to consider the first is the

camera second one is the placement of the mat painting and the projection geometry I'll go through what these are in further detail so a math painting always looks best when it's viewed head-on and the further The View angle Strays from that head-on position the more the illusion will start to break and you'll get Distortion in the actual matte painting and when it comes to place the mat painting in a game I always think of a game level as having three layers we have the foreground geometry you have the backdrop geometry and the Sky Box where the foreground is the player interactable space the backdrop is the like the jump towards the Skydome but you can never interact with it and the Skydome of course is just the texture and you can basically place a mat painting as close to the player as you want the projection geometry and the texture resolution will be the limiting

factor but it usually holds up really close so this is a little formula I use just keep it in the back of your head if you're going to do a mat painting so the distance to the camera and the view angle for example if you're going to view the math painting from the start of the level and the end of the level you'll have like a 90 degree change of angle of view that kind of dictates the complexity of your geometry data you're going to create so why use the math painting in the first place you could just paint a detail and information in the Skydome or make a 3D model I mean every product is different and you kind of need to make your own judgment calls but a skym most usually does not have the text resolution for a good like detailed backdrop and it also lacks Parallax which will talk on later on the 3D model

approach is great and I would actually recommend it but it takes a lot of time and it's really tough to iterate on but if you have the project and the timeline that allows it go ahead Do It um yeah let's get into the creation process so for this example I'm going to create a math painting for a level segment in a firstperson shooter and it's a Travers area between two gameplay areas and this is the prime location for a mat painting player has nothing to do except breathe out between like two very intense hopefully encounters and they just can like get a pallette cleanser and enjoy the view and of course it's a Sci-Fi Universe because that's what I like doing uh so this is a brief uh kind of outline the steps I have here you can skip some you can move them around a bit with experience experience but it's good

to have as a starting point so first up is selecting the camera location so I have a fly through of the level example we're going to be working with and as you can see there are going to be a couple of instances where the camera looks kind of Straight Ahead into the void that is an ideal camera hero view I like to call it basically the reference point of our map painting and basically when you're going to select the camera view you want to have it in the middle point of the level for example you see there's a maybe a 50 meter segment that we're going to be walking through so we want to have it in a place that represents the best picture of those 50 m of traversal so here we see the critical path though the the player path in a more overhead view with the dots

representing the potential camera locations we have a start a middle and a ending camera location and they also have kind of a difference in verticality you start a level maybe 20 M higher when than you actually end the level and we need to select the midpoint for the vertical vertical position as well because the perspective will be decided by the actual hero location that we choose if the location is too low the perspective will look wrong in the beginning if it's too high it will look wrong in the end so this uh the one in the middle is the selected hero location look straight out into the void like the matte painting territory and it's in the vertical middle of the level and the kind of horizontal middle as well so the next step is blocking it out I use unreal in this example and using their brushes and 3D models I

quickly kind of make a blockout of the composition that I want to have and it's really important to work on it through the entire level segment watching it from every single View and paying attention to both the scale cues and kind of The Parallax you get and the distance and scale you get from the small objects next to the big ones because in the end if it doesn't look good in this it will there's no way to save it um and in this example as well we have a lighting setup which provides us with some nice specularity and some nice shadows and for a matte painting it is kind of a must to have some sort of basic lighting setup in the beginning because you will position your objects and your matte painting elements in order to catch that light to get the specularity to really communicate the materials of the objects that you have

it's the main key ingredient of doing a good matte painting so the more work you get done in this stage the better and as I said before this is like the defining point it might not look like much it's just a couple of boxes but to me it's the most important point because if it doesn't work here it will never work so the next step is creating the concept art you might already have a concept before starting I'm a concept artist I usually work on my own concepts for the math paintings every studio is different but my process is to export the foreground geometry of the level export the camera as well and the blockout that way I have a one to one representation of the level but in my 3D package and I can confidently go forward and just flash the mat painting out uh without any kind of hesitation if it will work in game or not if it works here it will work in game

and don't be afraid to kind of go back switch up the camera angles and experiment because we only spend like a half a day maybe at this point with a finished concept maybe one day two days and the part of this technique is that it's so straightforward that you can just restart it restart it and restart it until you really get the good composition that sells the fantasy you're going for but the downside of being a concept artist is you want to make a kickass concept and that is this is not the time to to create a kickass concept necessarily it's a step in the process this is just a sketch in order for us to uh get information on what elements we want in the actual mat painting for example how does the sky intersect with the space elevator that I made here how does the god race look how does the fog interact I think I put yeah I put some red position lights which are always a favorite thing of mine to put and all those elements need to be

represented in the matte painting using additional geometry or shaders so even this concept for me is a way to plan out my coming workflow so once this is done we're going to set up the projection and basically we're using the concept art camera we're zooming it out to give us more screen real EST EST estate as you can see there's kind of space for the mountains and space for the sky as well because this is more like the player is going to see in game and the concept is always zoomed in to look awesome and sell stuff but this the Practical camera we have enough geometry and kind of space in the foreground to create the transition as well once we get to that stage so in most cases as I said before you're going to need to reposition your camera and tweak it until you actually

get a good matte painting render out of your 3D scene and once you've done that you're going to go ahead and basically duplicate the scene and delete all your beautiful geometry and add a plane instead and uh you can just map your plane to that map your texture to that plane using a UV projection from the camera and then you should have basically the same result as your heavy 3D SC but just on a flat plane and this is basically the setup that goes into the engine and uh as you can see here we have yeah basically the matte painting concept but just on a plane projected in the game world yeah and the good part about it is the fact that even if it's just a plane you get immense amount of detail and that's the power of this technique so thank you for coming to my talk and

uh yeah have a good afternoon no just kid it no no no no no so that's the point if it does look if it doesn't look good right now it never will right it's um everything after this stage is just creating more detail in the mat painting fleshing it out and having fun with it but this is the main iteration cycle right you select your camera position you place the mat painting in the world and you create your projection geometry and it's never get better it's never going to get better no much like no matter how much painting time or rendering time you put into it so this is the next step in the process we have fleshed out the train and the actual 3D geometry of the main building and as you can see the difference is not huge but the detail is starting to get in there and the Skydome is there as well it's just a 16bit hdri

but it's an important part to try to build up towards the concept that we did earlier and keeping the models at around 80% finished is kind of a core concept here you don't want to push it too far because you still want to be able to go back and change things and there's a couple of more steps we're going to add on before we can pull the trigger and just go to town and paint so we also want to refine our plane or our projection geometry in order to get the most out of it in the engine so just by adding depth into the projection geometry we can create Parallax and we can make the matte painting stand up much more to different view angles than just a flat plane and as you can see we have the mountains moving in the back in relation to the Sci-Fi structure and that kind of Illusion really helps set the tone of the m painting and helps it integrate

into the game world it's really easy to overdo it and uh but that kind of breaks the illusion as well so don't have too much fun with the the parallx and the next step when kind of The Parallax works is to add Dynamic elements so for me I want to have the matte painting working in a static shot here I've added some simple Sky animation using flow maps and to kind of integrate that into the painting I also added Cloud Shadows which is basically a noise texture that we just tile over the all over the math painting kind of match the speeds and it already makes it feel like it's a kind of a part of the game lighting and Game World instead of just painting and as it's cherry on top I'm I'm putting in my my favorite signal lights as well here they come nice which is basically just a agitative PL that we make visible and hide with a looping script and just by

adding these elements you have something that looks like a it could just be a 3D model right in a game there's no real difference from the player's point of view but it's just a very cheap asset and quick asset to make so at this point we have our projection geometry set up we have our refined shapes we have our Dynamic elements we know that this is going to work right we can actually start enjoying the the the work process so for this stage what I've done here is I basically just improved on the train geometry improved on the the Sci-Fi asset geometry improved on the Skydome and uh the dynamic elements as well making sure that the speeds of the animation is correct and also adding Cloud planes and missed cloud cloud cards to helps the painting sit better into the actual environment and the key part of this part is actually to hide

all the seams and make sure that it seamlessly integrates with the backdrop geometry in this case I put the seams in the shadow areas which is a cheap trick but if you can't do that just make sure that the edges are high poly and that that it intersects with the geometry in a nice way um and there always other tricks you can use three cards Etc Alpha blending so basic this is the Target that you want to reach you have a really detailed background that is basically uh almost a oneman show it takes usually between one to two weeks to make uh or even shorter if the brief is simpler and I mean when we're at that stage with the refined 3D we can just start painting and I think that's the beauty at least for me as a concept artist of this technique is we have the texture set up so I can use whatever tool that I want photos photo bashing

just pushing the 3D more just to create the most kind of Epic painting I could possibly create but the actual limiting factor is as I said before the texture texture memory um yeah and also a good point to to think about is if you push the detail too much you will eventually kind of overdo it like you will have a m painting that is more detailed in the game world and that kind of like ruins their entire thing you need to restain yourself and remember that you're working on a on a game that needs to like look cohesive so what about performance right it's always a big question in games and like I said before this is an unlit asset it's low poly but it still has kind of a performant foot footprint even if it's really lightweight and of course the heaviest element is the texture size but it's also very scalable and it's a known

quantity up front you know what you're going to aim for and it's going to be con constant once you actually pay that cost and the geometry should should be super light you can go from a couple of hundred triangles to like a couple of thousand depending on the complexity of your projection Etc and the Shader set setup as I said is extremely simple Alpha overdraw like in this case can be a factor but you can also just cut off the geometry using the alpha Channel and just remove all Alpha straight away so in my mind this technique is really fast and efficient that's why I I'm promoting it today and it's a good way to uh create all inspiring moments in games uh and just helps your players get into that fantasy and enjoy the world and uh yeah that's my approach to creating math paintings in games and uh thank you guys for coming

also a shout out to uh Justin for mentoring the talk and Joan bayek back at home he's my Shader guy who helped me with this workflow and the remed is hiring go inad and check it out looking for a lot of positions uh from all over the world and that's my socials if you want to get in touch or have any questions okay any any questions oh well then I wish you a great afternoon and uh a good flight home oh we have one H yeah no yeah cool um I just wanted to ask you how much support you have for from the 3D artist to create that structure do you do it all yourself yourself or yeah I um usually do it myself but

I'm a very 3D heavy concept artist nowadays but I mean if we are in production and we actually have a asset library then the work is already done right so I'll just kit bash away yeah so the actually design of that structure is yours as well like no one okay yeah thanks thank you maybe one more question so of course um when you show the parallx effect that you just split up the plane as manual work into more vertices and then extrude it or is that an automatic process no since the geometry is so low poly I just do it manually and the UVS are projected from the camera so there's no work when it comes to remapping the UVS or anything it's just moving vertices into space yeah okay thank you

you how much you rely on uh like what's your split between 2D and 3D like how much are you doing hand painting versus the 3D rendering nowadays I do like 70 to 90% 3D uh but it all depends on the actual brief for example train mountains and stuff in this case I almost always photos because it's not worth the time investment for me as a artist to do the high-end train stuff not yet but thank you okay well thank you all and have a good [Applause] [Music] afternoon