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Matte Painting 101: Meteor Impacts
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Matte Painting 101: Meteor Impacts

on Jul 8th 2011 with 17 comments
Tutorial Details
  • Program: Adobe Photoshop CS5
  • Difficulty: Beginner
  • Estimated Completion Time: 1 Hour

Final Product What You'll Be Creating

Download Source Files

Matte painting is a technique that filmmakers use to create backgrounds for scenes that can’t or don’t exist in real life. In the early days, matte paintings were actually painted onto glass. Today, modern filmmakers use digital applications such as Photoshop to produce the backdrops that they need. We have published many matte painting tutorials on this site meant for intermediate and advanced users. This tutorial is part of a series of tutorials that we will be publishing on this meant for those of you who may be relatively new to Photoshop or matte painting in general.

Today’s tutorial, Matte Painting 101: Meteor Impacts will teach you how to destroy a city with meteors. In this tutorial you will learn how to paint streams of smoke, and break up buildings. Let’s get started!

Tutorial Assets

The following assets were used during the production of this tutorial.

 
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Rollover to read this author's bio or click through to see a full list of posts by this author.

I was born in Mexico City, worked and studied photography at Eastman Kodak while training in minilab management and traditional darkroom techniques. Now I am steadily growing in the freelance world on matte painting, digital art/illustration and even some 3d modeling.  

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  • http://dribbble.com/shots/207954-UFO-Icon Meachis

    Nice tutorial, I think the final product is a bit to dark, the shadows are a bit to heavy for me, just my padawan-opinion :P

    - http://dribbble.com/shots/207954-UFO-Icon
    - Meachis

    • Hugo

      I agree, the vignette is too dark and the contrast too much. But the final result is really nice though! :)

  • Michael Owens

    The BASE IMAGE is no longer available on the stock site.
    Can you please arrange a replacement?

  • Salu

    I really like your technique of breaking up buildings. I normally use stock photos of destroyed buildings because I don’t have a tablet to speed the process up. However, I felt that the explosions near the impact sites looked too transparent, but that’s not the point of the tutorial is it ? :)

  • Gereltod

    Great tutorial.

  • SteveR

    So Ed…

    According to your last few tutorials we haven’t got that long on this planet?

    :)

  • patweiss

    Nice tutorial but so sad that those brushes aren’t compatible with lower cs versions? get the error and cant use them. maybe someone could do them in cs 3 or 4 so everyone can use them not only cs5.

  • Hazzy

    So i went to try out this Tutorial, but the stock photo has the watermark (figured) are you able to upload the image without the watermark or is there a tutorial on how to do so?

  • http://www.parasuniversal.com Paras Universal

    Wow… excellent!

  • Brendon

    Lighting is off on the hot air balloons, but maybe that’s not the focus of the tutorial. The rest was quite interesting.

  • http://www.5150studios.com.au Mick Davies

    Nice work! Who doesn’t love a good meteor impact! Cheers Mick

  • Rajesh

    your so helpful in my profession

  • http://www.newportweddingphotographer.co.uk richard p walton

    Amazing, you made it look so simple, really good tutorial though, loved how you cracked the side of the building, thank you very much for sharing

  • http://www.aphrodite1994.com mark

    There’s something about the smoke trails that looks a bit false but I like the concept. Thanks for featuring

  • Dronzer

    OK guyz….now u m8 ol think me as crazy but i seriously need to ask..
    Where is the tutorial? I have downloaded the 80mb rar file which has the .psd file along with brushes etc, but where is the written guide/explanation whatever. Please help.

    • Harry

      It’s a video…