Matte painting

Historically, matte painters and film technicians have used various techniques to combine a matte-painted image with live-action footage (compositing).

At its best, depending on the skill levels of the artists and technicians, the effect is seamless and creates environments that would otherwise be impossible or expensive to film.

The first digital matte shot was created by painter Chris Evans in 1985 for Young Sherlock Holmes for a scene featuring a computer-graphics (CG) animation of a knight leaping from a stained-glass window.

Die Hard 2 (1990) was the first film to use digitally composited live-action footage with a traditional glass matte painting that had been photographed and scanned into a computer.

One of the modern approaches adopted to address this is the integration of details from a photograph, say, of real places to depict realistic scenes.

Matte World Digital collaborated with LightScape to simulate the indirect bounce-light effect[10] of millions of neon lights of the 1970s-era Las Vegas strip.

Although ILM CG Supervisor Stefen Fangmeier came up with the idea of projecting Yusei Uesugi's aerial painting of Neverland onto a 3D mesh modeled by Geoff Campbell while working on the motion picture Hook in 1991, projection-mapping based 3D environment matte art was until recently, like its predecessor matte painting has been, the industry's best-kept secret.

The involvement of 3D in this until then 2D art form was revealed by Craig Barron in 1998 after completing their work on the feature film Great Expectations when they introduced this technique as a 2.5D matte to the public.