Toon Shaders

I'm gong to experiment a bit more with toon shading so here's a link for my reference:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZfoo6GEOCs

Maya Cross Hatching

I've been pondering how to give a less 'CG' look to my film so here's a link for future reference.

The clip of the rotating shape is ace.

http://area.autodesk.com/blogs/duncan/crosshatch_shading

Environment: final look

Here are some stills showing the textured environment with contour outlines comped on and integrated with background artwork from David Fleck

Writer Wood Textures

I've been playing around with some different wood grain and colour so that I've got a decent reference when I make the final tweaks to the existing wood grain texture that I'm using for the Writer character - here are the front runners so far:

Look Develpment: Reference

A good reference for the style I'm going for with textures etc.

Environment Design: perfect reference

Thanks to Garry (http://garrywhittonanimator.wordpress.com/) I now have some perfect ref for my environments.

He was walking through Edinburgh, saw these in a gallery window and immediately thought of my project, and he's right - they're exactly the look that I'm going for. Thanks Garry! :D

The gallery is the Red Door Gallery (it's a lovely place, make sure you pop in if you're ever in Edinburgh) and the artist is the very talented Mr David Fleck: http://fleck-tesseract.tumblr.com/

Look Development: Contour Rendering

I'm hoping to create a 'drawn' look for my environments by combining contour renders with illustrative textures. Here's my first attempt at rendering contours - it needs a lot of tweaking but. having done this quick test, I'm now confident that it's going to work eventually :)

 

Look Development: Black & White

Playing with the idea of a brown-paper character in a black and white world

Look Development: Paper World

After lots of experimenting here's my first image of a shape with a paper texture. (Sorry the background image isn't great quality - my camera's broken so I resorted to my iphone.) There's loads of work still to do - but from a starting point of barely knowing how to create a light in Maya I'm pleased with my progress so far.

Look Development: Paper World

I've UV'd my model so now onto texturing and lighting.

Getting the UV's working took much longer than I expected. I'm still at a stage with Maya where everything's going swimmingly then I hit a button, everything suddenly looks totally different and I've no idea how to get back to where I was. In the end I used automatic UVing with 6 planes which was perfect for a simple model like this where most faces are parallel to one of those planes.

I think that I need to get my head around how Maya wants me to think if that makes any sense at all! It's a steep learning curve but there's definitely light at the end of the tunnel and I'm really enjoying learning. I particularly like being able to work in 3D and I'm glad I made the choice to go down this route.

Look Development: Paper World

Inspired by Su Blackwell's work (here's her 'Snow Queen') I decided to start testing out some shapes with paper textures in maya.

I've modelled a stag so the next step is to start playing around with lights and textures.

Look Development: Asics Ad

I was taking a break from working to watch Real Madrid vs Barcelona in the Champion's League (incidentally the sending off was a disgrace!) and saw a really interesting Asics advert. A quick you tube search didn't bring it up, but I did find the ad below instead.

This is really interesting with reference to the paper world in my script that Margarita creates for herself and the writer. The stop motion approach isn't really relevant but the style could influence how I think about modelling my paper environment. Also, some of the environments are beautifully lit and framed. I've still not really locked down a look for my environments yet so it's good to have images like these ones to think about.