MPTK

The Mattepainting Toolkit is a plugin suite for Autodesk Maya that helps artists build photorealistic 3D environments with minimal rendering overhead. It offers an extensive toolset for working with digital paintings as well as datasets sourced from photographs.

A typical workflow involves first importing source images and calibrated camera positions into Maya. MPTK is then used to drive camera projections by blending the images together based on the scene geometry. Viewport shaders allow for interactive modeling to precisely align scene objects, while Mental Ray and V-Ray shaders leverage raytracing for object occulsion.

Features

Examples

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

This establishing shot of Paris in the 1950s (Matteworld Digital, 2008) was modeled from city planning data and textured with aerial photographs using the Mattepainting Toolkit.

Zero Dark Thirty

The Mattepainting Toolkit was used on this shot in Zero Dark Thirty by mattepainter Kent Matheson.

San Francisco Transamerica Tower

The first use case for the Mattepainting Toolkit was combining the texture detail of aerial photography with simple geometry to create realistic CG environments for feature films. Much of the geometric complexity of cityscapes can be convincingly represented through textures if the relative parallax is low—a trick mattepainters have been using since the earliest days of visual effects.