During the early stages of the project we established that we would like a definite toon-y visual style when developing Nami:TLW. Referring to Genndy Tartakovsky’s – Samurai Jack, Jamie Hewlett’s – Gorrillaz and Animation Workshop’s – The Reward
Researching into how people translated this effect over to 3D animation brought up some awesome results. Such as FEAST and SHOOMS ODYSSEY
We loved the definite rim light and solid colours shown of in the renders of these animated projects, We knew from previous experience that we could get similar results using a cel shader on our renders and tweaking the visuals in post, however we didn’t like the default Arnold shader at the time, particularly because it ignored light direction which we needed to achieve the nice rim light effect from our renders.
After doing some research into additional cel shader set ups for Arnold I found out that solid Angle were currently working on developing a new cel shader, however it’s release was to far off from when we needed it.
However, looking for additional tools that were currently avaliable and compatible with Arnorld 5 we came across a shading script developed by Steffano Richi.
The script allowed us to create a toon shader, using native nodes of maya which also created AOV automatically, which was incredibly useful and time saving.
Interested in seeing how it would work with our assets, Kerry, Sorcha and Natasha did a few test with the shader which provided some really promising results.
we absolutely loved the visual the shader helped generate and as a bonus it also calculated light direction.
Computer GENERATED 