Thesis Preview: Messing around with Toon Shading

Given that my early sketches of my project relied heavily upon a cartoon style, my professor recently asked me if I had tried anything like it with my models. The truth is I had no idea how to do it, beyond messing with textures. I planned on researching it later on, when I would be focusing more on texturing my characters.

However, today I was watching a video about Nintendo's Wind Waker HD and how they had to alter their toon shader to suit the HD graphics and emphasis on new lighting effects. That got me thinking about using a shader to do some of the heavy lifting for me, or at least to see what I could do with it.

Maya has a Toon option under the Rendering set of menus, so I figured I'd start there. It was really easy to set up some quick shaders and tweak their parameters to come up with some results that looked good. While I'm definitely going to research this approach more and work with my own painted textures, this gives me a good idea of what Maya can do to help me. Check out my results below. Click on the images for a closer look.

Compare these new results with my earlier render to see what a difference there is between the two.

Thesis Preview: Figuring Out a Costume for Ralph

This morning I spent some time trying to figure out a good costume for Ralph. My early renders from a couple of weeks ago show that I already made some attire for Ralph, but I just wasn't happy with how he was looking. So, I went back to the drawing board. I did a render of Ralph from an angle where I could do some paper-doll-like costume painting in Photoshop. Then I copied his image a couple of times and got to work.

My previous renders of Ralph, looking all traditional

I really want to highlight his athleticism and pride in his culture. He is Scottish through-and-through and aspires to be one of the greatest Scots to have ever lived. As such, I am gravitating towards traditional Scottish garb. However, as you saw in the previous renders, going too traditional brings him out of the future (where my story takes place) and loses some of the confident athleticism that I want to be readily apparent.

However, I really like the kilt on him (although I shortened it a bit just to see how it would look; I think I'll lengthen it back). I just needed to toy with different tops. My gut instinct was to give him a jacket modeled after Ryan Gosling's "Drive" character. This is the Ralph on the left. I also wanted to toy with the notion of a soccer jacket, with cleats, paired with the kilt. This is the center one. On the far right I went with running shoes and a full body Adidas-like sweat suit. I am flirting with the notion of designing a sweat suit with a plaid pattern, but I worry that it will look too much like pajamas.

In any case, this was my morning project. I'm excited to use this approach with my other characters.