MattePaint.com – The world’s largest image resource built specifically for artists
MattePaint announced the public beta release of their gallery in September, making it the world’s largest online image resource specifically built for artists. The gallery contains tens of thousands of HDR, panoramic, high-resolution images shot by VFX artists all over the world.
“The Gallery is a massive leap forward for artists, both in VFX and Games,” says Conrad Allan, CEO and co-founder of MattePaint. “It exists so that artists don’t have to spend hours trying to find suitable images and solves issues with quality and resolution. It’s drastically improving the speed of our studio clients.”
“Ongoing development has seen industry professionals and major studios take part in driving it forward and we are thrilled to finally release this collective effort to the public.”
The online gallery currently has just over 25,000 images available and over 70,000 still to come with more being captured every month.
“It’s a huge task, cataloguing and processing all the images. We captured 16,000 shots in Nepal just recently and this will result in around 5,000 finished images for the gallery after the HDR’s and Panorama’s are built,” says Conrad. “We have an AI we trained to keyword the images so that cuts out on some of the work,” he continues.
The solution has been adopted by a rapidly growing number of game and film artists prior to its official release, with images used in The Martian, Assassin’s Creed and Warcraft; arguably a selection of the most visually stunning films of recent release and constitutes an impressive showcase for the library.
“The gallery is an amazing set of images,” says David Luong, Senior Cinematics Artist at Blizzard Entertainment, who reflects on the experience of using the library: “MattePaint has become an indispensable resource for me in my work.”
MattePaint’s assets are captured by artists in the industry, ensuring the images are suitable for all productions from films to games and advertisement to archviz. They’re also the highest resolution images available online for artists, going up to 1,100 megapixels. “Some of the images are insanely high resolution too, 60,000+ pixels wide, and we’ve seen some amazing work come from it,” says Conrad.
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User artwork
The library is built around a philosophy that images should be cheap to access, free of copyright issues and easy to utilise in production. Every image is available for free at 1200px to subscribed members and image costs for higher resolutions are fractions of what is available elsewhere.
“Our goal was to build a resource that is useful to professionals and students so that’s why our base subscription gains unlimited access to free resolution images and a bonus 500 credits a month to spend on higher resolutions, this starts at $9/mo” Conrad says. “Credits also roll-over an extra month on all accounts so if you have intermittent work, you’re not going to lose those credits,” He continues.
Once off purchases of credit packs are also available and don’t expire for 3 years. Conrad informs us if you’re a subscriber and purchase a credit pack, your monthly credits are used up first, before the longer lasting credit-pack credits. It’s the small things like these that show the company is thinking about their users and maximising their value.
All prices are 30% off for a limited time making the entry subscription less than $6.50/mo.
MattePaint will be running a multi month-long competition through December, all registered users will be eligible to enter and will receive free sample packs for the competition so make sure you register!
You can also engage with MattePaint on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter.
