INTERACTIVE :: 12/10/16 - Toon shaders

After our tutorial today, I asked Lena and Regan about toon shaders in unity, and was directed to a downloadable package.  From there I used various duplications of the 'ToonShaderLit' material in order to re-create my mushrooms with a more cartoony/comic feel to them.

I quite like these shaders as I was able to use the UVs that I had previously made with them.  The shading is based on a simple gradient which I was able to open in photoshop and modify in order to create a harsher gradient.  Here are the screenshots I took while I was playing around with them

I quite like the results, though I may need to play around with gradients a bit more and see what happens when I put in things like a colored gradient instead of just plain greyscale.

This evening I plan to redraw my moth character, or at least tweak the drawing i did from the first assignment so that I can spend the next few days trying to build a model in Maya.

17/08/15 - Character progress and completed prop!

Over the past week, I've been working on building both my prop and modelling my character.  The lack of updates can be contributed to this; I've mostly just been doing grunt work and slowly making progress on my models.  I've tried to document as many stages of progress for these so far, so below are the screenshots documenting this.

First up, my character.  This is how he's currently looking, and the process of building him was simple enough.  I had a few issues with his feet, but rotating things about seems to have fixed them for the most part.

I'm also rather proud of his hands.

He's still missing a few key parts; I need to sculpt in his hair, eyes and mouth, and I may also have to do some refining on his nose and general face area.  The part that connects his arm to his shoulders also seems a bit sketchy now that I look at it, and I may work on refining that too.


As for my prop, it is quite possibly complete!  There has been quite a bit added to it since last time.
First off, more edge loops to keep the sharpness of the facets:

I texturized it with a Blinn shader in an attempt to give it a glassy/icy look:

Transparency was bumped up so that you could see through the ice and then an image plane with the character was inserted into the middle of it to make them look frozen and suspended:

Now more or less completed, all I needed to add was a turntable and play with some lighting effects to make the crystal really stand out.

Once I was finished, however, I noticed that the image was flipping when the back of the crystal was towards the camera, which destroyed the illusion of the character turning about.  In order to fix this, I duplicated the plane and changed the file input to a plain, single color version of the image.  It makes the ice at the back look more dense, and doesn't show the character's face on both sides, which is what I was aiming for.

The final turnaround will be uploaded in a separate video, so stay tuned!

10/08/15 - Character Modelling

Today's lesson was an exercise in physical modelling!  Tutor gave us some clay to sculpt our characters, in order to figure out how we would go about wireframing and mapping out their basic shapes and dimensions.

Here is the little Embry that I managed to make in that time:

Drawing a wireframe on him was a little more difficult!  But it helped to have a visual drawn on him and gave me a few expectations for creating his actual wireframe in Maya.  A few places needed more subdivisions than others (most notably his feet needed the most and his arms had the fewest), and having a physical sculpt made me put quite a bit of thought into how I would sculpt certain parts of him.  I'm still honestly rather stumped on how I'm going to do his hair and if I really want his hands to be so blocky.

More progress has been made on my crystal prop and I'm certain I'm almost finished sculpting it.  I do feel like I could have done all of the facets in a bump map or in mudbox now that I look at it, and the final has a lot of edge loops in close proximity to create the sharp edges of the facets, but smoothed it actually looks quite nice.  I'll upload a screencap when I next use the program.

In the meantime, I did manage to draw a frozen Vasili for the plane within the ice crystal itself:

09/08/15 - Prop work

Spent most of the weekend working on my prop.  As it is a more or less simple shape with a lot of less simple facets, it has been easy enough constructing the shape.  The faces are more of a problem, as a lot of them are triangle shaped, which causes problems in the mesh once it is smoothed.  Currently I'm working on refining this, but here is the basic set up of the faces in the meantime:

If it were possible, I would like to simply leave the mesh the way it is now and not have to think about the smoothed version.  As it stands though, I need to reinforce some of the edge and work out how to keep all those triangles pointy without having the thing warp in on itself.

I've also been working on the character who is technically a part of this prop and have made a couple of character sheets to test out colors and things for them.  The first is a color test, and the second is what they would look like with texture and a blue overlay, since they would be underneath the ice in the final prop:

While designing this character, there were a few things I wanted to keep in mind:

• Vasili is a Druid and is supposed to have a very ambiguous gender and could be either male or female.  In reality, they are neither.  They're basically a plant, just like Embry is basically a lump of clay.
• I chose a lot of earthy colors for them - brows and greens, going for a tree or flower sort of theme.  The palettes at the beginning and end of the row are my favorite ones, though chances are I'll be using the one on the end for my final piece of them.
• They are meant to represent Embry's opposite, so are tall where he is short, dark where he is light and have sleepier eyes and longer fingers than his.  Like a tree, they just want to sit in the sun and photosynthesize, but doing it alone can be quite lonely.
• Most importantly, Vasili  takes inspiration from a character created by maedaeme on tumblr, and their likeness in this project has been used with permission.

The only thing I need to draw of them now is the frozen pose from my storyboards and animatic - I've already got the sketch finished, and hope to complete the rest of it tonight.