Sky Matte Painting 01

This is a 360 degree spherical projection matte painting used as a "sky box" for a game level.

The image is distorted - most noticeably at the top and bottom - because it's intended to be mapped to a spherical 3D geometry. The ideal way to view this is from the center of a sphere with the painting applied to it as a texture.

The image was produced in Lightwave 3D, and rendered using the excellent orthographic and special camera. The terrain and the clouds are textured subdivision surfaces that have been "sculpted" with displacement textures.

Some additional painting was done to blend together the various elements, since the sky and ground were rendered separately due to memory limitations. I also painted in some additional clouds, most notably the weird storm seen at the right.

The original image dimensions were 8192 x 4096 pixels. In reducing it to post it here, I altered the proportions to achieve a more accurate view as seen in this format

This image is the property of Electronic Arts, and it's shown here as a portfolio sample