On to Matte Painting #4.  This is a scene from the original series episode "The Cage" and also reused in "Requiem for Methuselah".

I didn't realize it until today but all of the matte paintings used for the series were all done in season 1.  I guess maybe they ran out of budget after that or something.

This image turned out to have a super duper twist in it that's going to hang up the whole thing.  When Whitlock painted this, he basically screwed up the horizon so that if you setup the scene with the correct horizon, the ground and the water won't line up.

It's very very hard for me to explain but suffice it to say, this particular image is turning out to be the trickiest of them all to get it to work correctly!

I'm about three days into this thing and I've finally finished all the primitive modeling (in other words, I pretty much know where everything goes now).  It's really important to model the scene just using simple things to get spacing and dimension correctly.

This process is a lot more tricky that it may seem and I've learned a lot of interesting things working on these projects so far.

Anyway, as before, I'll post as I go.

-Kix