Extended Drone Shot & Skyline Extension - Dubai

Role: Digital Matte Painter | Environment Study (Jie Zhou Course)

The Goal

Taking a production-ready plate and camera track as a starting point, the goal of this study was to push the boundaries of a 2.5D environment extension. I aimed to take a provided base layout and evolve it into a high-fidelity, cinematic sequence that required complex architectural integration and meticulous atmospheric matching.

The Workflow

While the original plate and camera track were provided, I rebuilt the entire environment pipeline to suit my specific creative vision. I modified the provided Maya base layout to better accommodate the new structures I planned to add. After creating custom, high-resolution matte paintings in Photoshop, I projected them onto the modified geometry in Nuke. The entire compositing script was built from scratch, focusing on a clean 2.5D setup that utilized the provided camera data but required entirely new integration techniques for the lighting and shadows.

The Real Challenges

  • Customizing 3D Layouts: Rather than sticking to the default setup, I altered the Maya geometry to create a more dynamic skyline. This required ensuring the new 3D volumes remained perfectly aligned with the provided tracking data to prevent any parallax errors.

  • Manual Shadow Logic: One of the most intensive tasks was manually painting the projected shadows in Nuke. Since I added new architectural volumes, I had to logically interpret how their shadows would fall across the existing Dubai landscape, matching the soft-light properties of the original drone plate.

  • Compositing from Scratch: By building the Nuke script from the ground up, I had total control over the atmospheric depth and color integration. I focused on matching the specific desert haze of the region to ensure the digital extensions felt as though they were captured in-camera.

  • Invisible Integration: The final challenge was ensuring my custom DMP work blended seamlessly with the provided high-end plate, requiring precise grain management and edge treatment.

Tools Used

  • Adobe Photoshop

  • Nuke

  • Maya

Production Note: Environment study utilizing plate and camera data from Jie Zhou. All DMP assets, modified 3D layout, and final Nuke compositing performed by Ricardo Nakazawa.

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