Maya Toon Shader
Since finishing the texture work from last week, this week I need to create Toon shader for our character in Maya. Cause this is my first time to make a cel shading project so I don’t have these experiences before. So I have to read so much materials like some cel shading process and Maya Arnold official guide of toon shader even some producer’s interview. This helped me a lot in this project on the limit time.
First I followed the Arnold official guide of toon shader (https://docs.arnoldrenderer.com/display/A5AFMUG/Toon) and created a toon shader for individual objects. And link the base color map in shader ball.
After that I needed to adjust some accurate results on each shaders. Like adjust angle threshold in edge detection the larger value I enter, the more accurate the outer contour line we get. Besides the tonemap in base color was also super important to adjust. This property has a direct impact on the color and effect of the shadows we want, and at first we misunderstood the meaning of this property. So I added a ramp map to control the shadow color. Others like specular was just the same like PBR production, cause its a metal object, so all I need to do was that turn up the metallicity.
Other thing need to mention about is that the flame on the bottom of the robot, I didn’t use the toon shader for it. Cause once I used toon shader for that, it will have outer liner which it exactly don’t need to. And I made a simple light texture on Photoshop just some outward blue fading light effects. Then put that in Maya and create a arnold stander surface ball for it and link this image to base color, opacity, emission color respectively. Also I need to turn down the button of opaque.
Finally I need to make a light set for it. For ease of production I mainly choose directional light. So I set a direction light with 2.0 intensity as my main light source and then set a light in the opposite direction to light the shadow area. That could keep my shadow area never too dark. Besides I add another light as a contour light with blue color and lock it on rim lighting in attribute. And I got my final rendering effect.
Improve The Scene
Guanze and Wanxuan worked together with the scene, so after I finished the characters shading I need to join in them to put all elements together and see what happens. I didn’t think their scene layout matched our script very well, so we came up with a new way of placing the living room. Besides, our scene is too empty, lacking a lot of life-like objects such as a picture frame of the main character or some unwashed dishes and bottles lying around in the kitchen. So we worked on this to keep the Mise-en-Scène more reliable.
Next week I will work on how to light the scene and do my best to get the first version of all elements together to lead others clip rendering effects.