Week 4 - An Interview from the Matte Painter in Star Trek

This post will be referencing this article:

http://www.cgsociety.org/index.php/CGSFeatures/CGSFeatureSpecial/star_trek_next_gen

In this CGSociety article, we get a short look into the process that the matte painter behind the Star Trek: Original Series remaster, Max Gabl. It's often interesting to hear the thoughts of the artists who are responsible for creating the scenery behind what we see in movies.

For those unfamiliar, a matte painting is essentially painted footage that is combined with the live footage. Matte paintings are frequently used and in particular in situations where shooting live is too difficult, expensive or actually impossible. While 3D renders are used a lot, matte painting has an advantage in terms of the time taken, and the pure ability to recreate. Especially in terms of terrain, where generators can sometimes create somewhat unexpected effects, and render times of any CGI can be very long.

In this case, the artist had a very quick turnaround, and discusses how he would create up to 3 planets in the course of a day, quickly brushing in 3 different layers of detail; the surface, clouds and atmosphere; using references from NASA images for realism. These paintings would then be projected or mapped onto a sphere and rendered in Cinema 4D.

What's interesting is that when he started on the series, it would take him 3 or 4 days to complete a single planet. Which is quite a considerable amount of time, but considering how a single episode could feature multiple planets for large number of shots, it was important to get a strong sense of realism and detail. The planets had to look just right, and he would liaison with the art director to ensure an absolute sense of quality. It's certainly impressive to see such an increase in speed and skill in what would have been a relatively short space of time.

Matte painters are frequently overlooked in discussions on a film outside of the effects industry. Their intense application of detail and frequent hand painted photorealism is impressive considering that they often knock out these immense paintings in the course of a day or three. In addition to this, they're often expected to be proficient in compositing in various programs, as well as 3D. Essentially meaning that they are not only very highly technically proficient, but also multi-talented across multiple disciplines and skill sets.

This frequently means that they know a lot of tricks and time savers to push high quality content out as quickly as possible. Like his process for backgrounds on a planet; where because the camera didn't move he was able to create them as 2D images with photoshop and the occasional 3D architecture render.

This is in contrast to his process for planets, which are animated and rendered in Cinema 4D. In addition to all this is the implicit rule in 3D.

'Don't make what you can fake.'

"For The Original Series, I usually created one high-resolution 2D image of every planet. We projected that 2D image onto a 3D sphere that was rotating, but only slightly, so as not to give away the fact that it was a 2D projection. For The Next Generation, you are looking at fully textured spheres that rotate quite a bit more, sometimes over 90 degrees, and that means much more surface has to be created."