Darin Hilton Art and Design

COSMOS

Concepts and Matte paintings

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Desert phase in the geologic evolution of this landscape.

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Jungle phase with Volcano in back.

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Volcanic phase.

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Painting over footage of Hawaiian volcanos we imagined what some distant planets may have looked like.

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More matte painting work over Hawaii footage, mega volcanos on either Mars or Venus, the final layers were projected back onto mesh geometry in Nuke.

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It was a lot of fun working on these shots, with broad scope to imagine varied rock formations. Here I took inspiration from Vasquez rocks outside of Los Angeles.

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Here water is eroding the volcanos and calderas, in comp we distorted the white water and the smoke layers to give a sense of movement.

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The water is subsiding and leaving behind toxic gases and mineral deposits, this matte painting shot was 3d projected over footage of mineral pools at a national park.

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A sequence showing a settler mission from Mars needed some additional details added to the ship. The ships hull opens up after takeoff and it sails on solar winds.

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The original design was very boxy. I added a bunch of structual detail and lighting to help give scale and interest.

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This was an unused concept imagining vertical farms on earth. In the one concept housing rises up in the middle.

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Cosmos TV show (2014)

Environment and concept work for the television show Cosmos starring Neil deGrasse Tyson. My first shot was a progression of images showing the geologic changes to a region over time, In 3 days I completed 3 seperate matte paintings which were animated by the compositing team adding steam, smoke, moving skies and sun flares. The rest of the shots involved augmenting footage shot in Hawaii with painted volcanoes and primeval rock formations to illustrate a former incarnation of the planet Venus.

I also helped the CG team with shots showing a theoretical mission from mars to find other habitable planets, I did several paintovers to help guide modeling and detailing. Finally, I completed some quick concepts of futuristic structures on earth combining living spaces and farming.