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

Paper Textures

So, after a long break I'm back to working on my short film and I've started with some texturing of Margarita

Writer Textures: Wood Grain

and here are the 3D textures inspired by the 2D research in my last post:

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:

Mia_x layered shaders

I've just mastered layered shaders using mia_x materials. Tons of forum posts said it wasn't possible then I found this genius tutorial:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4uRx3ID5oMY

(NB remember to check the 'alpha is luminance' box on the texture that you're using as an alpha - for some reason that's the step I always forget to do)

I'm loath to share this image as there's SO much work still to do to get it to look right, but using layered shaders enabled me to get a wood shader onto the hands and a separate graphite shader onto the 'nails'.

Writer: Wood Texture

And here's my first attempt at applying a wood texture to my model.

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 :)

 

Writer UVs

Going great guns on UVing now, check out my chequered man.