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.

22/10/15 - Pre-animation setup!

Now that I've sorted out my rig, I've had to return to my prop and clean it up a bit in order to set up a scene for animating.  That has basically been what I have focused on today; just setting up a skydome and texturizing everything to make it fit for animating.

Here are a few screenshots:

I might still change it from its current skydome sphere to more of a cube shape though, in order to reflect the sense that the characters are within a building rather than out in the open somewhere

06/10/15 - Progress report

I've come to realize that Rigging deals with a lot of time consuming technical work - The past two weeks have been spent building up a skeleton for my model and proceeding to paint it and add controls to it.

Making an accurate skeleton only took a couple of days, but most of the last two weeks were spent working on an assignment for another class, so I neglected my 3D quite a bit and did not progress as quickly as i would have liked.  Regardless, my skeleton seems to work quite well, though figuring out the different ways to create rigid and more fluid/natural joints took a little bit of time.

First attempt at a skeleton actually yielded some flaws - The upper legs in this image are much too short and the character's core is not centered in the body.  Tutor was very helpful in helping me correct these flaws though!

I spent most of last week trying to paint my skin weights before rumors went around that we needed to have added controls in before binding the skin and painting.  I didn't get very far with it, but I was using a mouse and one of the students from the 3D class told me that it would be much easier to do with a tablet and pen.  Once I'm done with controls, I intend to properly paint my skinweights onto my character using my desktop at home.

Here is some of the progress I made with my skin weights though

Before Fixing

After Fixing

As of yesterday I've been setting up controls for my rig.  It is set up for FK controls at the moment, but I will be adding IK controls to the legs over the afternoon session.

Still need to work on hands and add constraints to the fingers, but I'll be working on those later on too.

20/08/15 - Completed Prop and Character Turnaround for Submission

COMPLETED PROP:

COMPLETED CHARACTER:

In the off chance that neither of these videos work, prop turnaround can be found here and character turnaround here on the daevabird tumblr.

17/08/15 - Prop Turnaround

Turnaround video of prop for Assignment 2 submission:

In the off chance that this doesn't work, the same video can be found on my tumblr.

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!