Character Design

MS2 Delivery

Investigation
ProjectPlan version 5
Prototype

Conclusion of the ms2 phase:

Textures, light and shaders has been developed and applied on a 3d model, with a goal that the model should look flat and hand-animated upon screen. It was realized that scenes in toon graphics can be kept simplistic and still look good and toon graphics can have drastically shorter render-time than other kinds of graphics. The texture was intended to show warm/cold skin tones in a stylistic way but also to act as a form of occlusion were there would normally always be shadows or dark lines, e.g below nose and eyebrows. Naturally it was developed to be neutral to any form of distinct light.

A new shader was developed from scratch. The new shader worked simply by a vRamp connected to a samplerInfo node. The ramp shader was at first set not to interpolate at all, and then provided with different alpha values - based on the alpha values of the skin tones in one of the projects concept drawings. The choise not to interpolate the ramp came from the strong desire to create different tones of shade. The ramp was however given a linear interpolation later on, but still kept very hard edges between the levels. Finally, the ramp was connected to the shader’s ambient color value:

The process of lighting the model was actually simpler than what was first thought. To get the stylistic, uncompromising light of a hand-animation, a spotlight was put up. Without either preumbra angle or dropoff, the light came up as sharp and cutting as desired. The colorgain was also pushed toward a reddish tone, providing the natural warmth of human skin and not having the character look unnatural. Shadowmaps were on high resolution to cut the sharp shadow contours:

When the lighting and shader was working satisfactory, it was time to ad a simple environment. A landscape painting was made, with horizontal tiling and then applied onto the upper half of a nurbs-sphere using a surface shader. The character was placed inside the nurbs-sphere and then the colorGain of the toonshader was adjusted in synchronicity with the light to have the character blend in the environment:

• Published by magnic-6 on Wednesday, January 28, 2009 - 23:47:45
• Add a comment