Breakthrough!

OMG, coloring a 3d character is not easy AT ALL! This is especially true since I want almost-absolute control over how my characters are rendered. I knew from the get go that the characters for "Meteor" were NOT going to be realistically shaded since they were modelled in a more simplfied way. But let's face it, standard cell shading SUCKS! With that in mind, I was inspired by the way TF2 ( team fortress 2, for the uninitiated) handled their game characters, but had little experience with Maya's hypershade to build something like that. In a nutshell, TF2's style creates a shader than emulates the illustrative rendering styles of 20th ct illustrators like:


J.C. Leyendecker

AND

Dean Cornwell

So I needed to learn alot. Above all, my main goal is to have the most control I can get before rendering. Here are some of my goals:

1)Build a shader that responds to light in an illustrative(i.e. non-realistic) way
2)Being able to work interactively to avoid rendering needlessly
3)Possibly creating the shader to allow control over the color and placement of attached shadows.


Now, here are some early attempts:





The first two images show my initial attempts at making a shader that would change the color of the surface in a way that I could control.Yo can see that as "Bob" shifts, the color of his head changes. However, the change doesnt "read" correctly. Its as if his head is being painted a different color as he turns! But what is working is that Ive managed to get the side of his face that is in shadow to be a color other than black! This may not seem like much, but in Maya most shaders automatically make the shadow side of an object black. So Im know Im on the right track. More on this next post...