Toon Shaders

After having staged the background I then started working on the look and style of the animation. We want to go for a cartoon style but before I stated adding shaders I first added a directional light and had a look at what it would look like without shaders.

Although this does look appealing, it is not the cartoon style we want so I added the Maya Toon shader and played around with various colours and properties. Below are some of the tests I did.

Here is a rendered version of the animated scene.

After messing around with the shader for a while I found a nice balance between keeping the clouds white and having blue shading on them. I also liked the black outlines on the clouds as it helped add to the cartoon style. However, after finding the right look for the animation using the Maya Toon shader I then realised I had made a mistake and should have been using the Arnold Toon Shader as the Maya one did not show up when I rendered it. So I started again using the Arnold toon shader which took me a lot longer to figure out. As you can see below I struggled to get back the cartoon look I had before. I Felt these ones were either too 2D or too 3D.

After talking with the rest of my group I tried some different looks they suggested such as trying grey shading and no outlines. Thanks to another member of my group finishing the 3D model of the character, I was able to add him into the scene.

After many many tries and mistakes I finally found the best look for our animation. I felt no outlines at all looked best and only the character having blue shading allowed him to stand out more. The background clouds only have a small amount of grey shading on them and they keep their 3D look. Below is the final version of the render.