Matte Painting in Games

Remedy Entertainment's Patrik Rosander helps make matte painting for games accessible and broaden use. It's a simple and powerful technique that is underutilized in game development, mainly because it is inaccessible. In this GDC 2023 session, gain a thorough understanding of the possibilities afforded through the use of matte painting.
Note: Repost of earlier upload.
GDC returns to San Francisco this March 18-22, 2024! For more information, be sure to visit our website and follow the #GDC2024 hashtag on social media.
Subscribe to the GDC newsletter and get regular updates via Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, or RSS.
Join the GDC mailing list: www.gdconf.com/...
Follow GDC on Twitter: / official_gdc
GDC talks cover a range of developmental topics including game design, programming, audio, visual arts, business management, production, online games, and much more. We post a fresh GDC video every day. Subscribe to the channel to stay on top of regular updates, and check out GDC Vault for thousands of more in-depth talks from our archives.

[@ProjectShinkai]

wow so many good techniques and theory.

[@charoleawood]

I've always been arrested by matte paintings, even the chunky designs in the original Half-Life captured my imagination.
Criterion's "Trickstyle", a Dreamcast launch game, had matte paintings to die for --- they're still beautiful to look at even now.

[@doko3000]

To me it was Quake 4, the Strogg world. They even added a little smoke effect out of a chimney in the distance, distant factories. I spent a good amount of time staring at that skybox art.

[@sdrawkcab_emanresu]

Is this a re-upload? I could have sworn I've seen the title and thumpnail before

[@gweatgawivarietydunk]

the description confirms that it is a reupload it seems

[@slothsarecool]

yep

[@sdrawkcab_emanresu]

Thanks you two

[@ahmedshakib3883]

The artwork is done by Max Burmann from learnsquarred.

[@pilouuuu]

Matte paintings can work really well. A good example is the movie Robocop.

[@somefishhere]

Still a good watch though I’ve seen the presentation already

[@Domarius64]

It's uploaded 8 hours ago yet it's already been added way down one of my playlists! What weirdness is this ...

[@melindaweixler3682]

Ola! ♫♪♫♪

[@Domarius64]

I think a better movie / theatre analogy would be a "backdrop", not a matte painting.

[@aledmb]

exactly, i watched this whole thing thinking "why is he refering to that as a painting when it clearly is an animated 3d model?"

[@EcchiRevenge]

.

[@fut0n]

.

[@nintendude794]

Periodt.

[@alec_almartson]

Dot

[@Patheticbutharmless]

To be honest, if this is all the artist is allocated, a flat plane, it would be better to have nothing there instead. It looks awful, it feels awful, there is NO way to add fidelity that even seems remotely seamless. This is the way things HAD to be in the 90's and early 2000's. But to see this now is baffeling. There are so many examples where this was done differently to much greater effect. You NEED basic geometry to play off of and this ressource should always be available.

[@aledmb]

it all depends on so many more variables, like project budget, scale of the universe that has to be modeled, minimum hardware specs that devs have to acknowledge, etc.

[@pakumies]

It's good for games that need to be superoptimized. League of Legends uses it on the outskirts of the playable area, and I'm pretty sure some DOOM vistas are made this way with the way that game runs.

[@Patheticbutharmless]

@@pakumies Nope. I give you "out of bound secrets | DOOM". In the vast majority of cases rudimentary geometry is used. As it should be. Everything else is lazy.