I have long wanted to teach myself the program Nuke, and this piece, with its extensive depth of field, seemed like the perfect excuse to create a digital matte. Beyond teaching myself the basics of the software, this goal posed another challenge, as the piece was near complete I had to go back in and add detail, and entirely new buildings, in spaces that might start covered, but soon be revealed with the parallax created by moving the camera.
The Matte in the position I created it in.
Some progress shots help to demonstrate how I picked the primary buildings and then started to fill the rest in from there, switching between detailing and adding filler.
All told, the matte had 26 layers all laid out at various intervals. Here are just 6 of them, all sets of buildings that are relatively equidistant from where the camera would be in real life.
