3d art

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Artist
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Peter Baustaedter
I have 15 years’ experience as a digital matte painter
and concept artist. Over the course of my career I’ve
used countless applications to create digital imagery. I
started out with Deluxe Paint and Sculpt 3D on a
Commodore Amiga in the late Eighties. Nowadays I
mostly use Photoshop, Vue, Maya and Nuke to create
my professional work.
My most noteworthy recent project is James
Cameron’s Avatar, for which I did countless matte
environments of Pandora at Weta Digital.
Lighting & rendering
Applying the final touches
The matte painter is coming through here I guess. I added a lot of clouds
09 that I lifted from my own photographs. Vue’s clouds are pretty good, but for
an illustration like this, photographic elements were the right choice in my opinion. I
have a photo archive of about 15,000+ photos – many of which are of clouds. Some
more atmosphere touch-ups finished this stage of the painting.
Launch! Maya, mental ray, Photoshop (2007)
Launch! was an image I made for my personal portfolio. It started
with a freehand sketch. Most of the elements in the final image
started out in Maya and were rendered through mental ray. None of
those renders were textured though, so any kind of surface detail
you see was added afterwards in Photoshop.
Untitled Vue 7, Photoshop (2009)
Usually after finishing a movie, I need to get it ‘out of my system’.
That means quite often I do artwork in the style of the project to try a
few things I didn’t get to do during my work on it. So this is an Avatarinfluenced
image – but has nothing to do with the movie – except that
I used techniques and styles I picked up during production.
Untitled Photoshop 4.0 (1999)
I thought I would throw in an old-school illustration of mine. I was
working on a matte painting that featured a lot of architecture and
got tired of all the hard edges and surfaces. So I sat down and
quickly painted this submarine alien – only featuring round and
curvy shapes and no windows, roofs and doors.
This is the final image. I added the birds as a foreground element, so now
10 the flipped image makes sense – it can be nicely read from left to right and
the birds lead you right into the heart of the image. I added a slight lens distortion
with a chromatic aberration and some grain and just slightly blurred the background
to slightly reduce the pixelated edge.
An overall Vue…
Flying over Crater Lake was a fun image to work on and it has encouraged me to get a
ZBrush licence and get into sculpting some extreme environments to take them into
Vue. I found I had to severely reduce the polygons of the mesh that came out of
ZBrush. With the high-res model, Vue was just laughing at me – it was quite a few
million polygons though. Vue’s 8.5 Terrain editor is very capable, but still can’t do
things that a 3D mesh-sculpting application can do.
One thing I noticed is that when taking sculpted geo into Vue is that a lot of detail
seems to get softened. I guess I might have saved time to just sculpt the big features
and then invested that time to tweak the rock shader some more, as I’m not too happy
with the look of the rock faces. Hopefully this can be remedied in a future project.
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