Anecdote

I was inspired by a post over at the BlenderArtists forum about matte painting, to give camera mapping (a technique employed in the modern matte painter’s toolbox) a try. I remember a while ago following this tutorial, but it was very “hacky” and complicated, now there is a much easier/simplified way of doing it.

I partially followed this tutorial over at the Blender Wiki, but I decided I wanted to try something more organic, and found this picture:

The first thing to do, was to isolate the foreground hill in the image, by cutting out the original reference image in GIMP:

Then I roughly modelled the hill in Blender, before using a “UVProject” modifier, which (as the name implies) projects the isolated image onto the 3D geometry.

The next thing to do was to prepare the background. Using the clone tool in GIMP, I repainted the parts of the background that the foreground hill were covering to produce a background image.

Admittedly the cloning was a bit rushed, so it’s not a very good result!

Anyway, all I needed to do now was to map this image to a plane (for even more realistic results, I could have roughly modelled the background mountain, and made a second projection), and make a simple camera move.

The result was quite good, but just to had some of the errors in my model, and to add “real-world” camera properties, I also added some motion blur (or Vector Blur, as it’s called in blender).

OK, so after all that, here’s the result:

Camera Mapping Test (AVI, h264)

Camera Mapping test from Joel Davies on Vimeo.