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.