Research

3D Research Assignment

Given that I am beginning to use 3D modeling within concept designs now, I thought it would be best to find tools within Maya that will aid me in making the process faster, since concepts must be finished quickly. In my previous attempts at mixing both 3D and 2D, I found the most time-consuming step by far was creating the  lineart on top of the model for the 2D image. Due to 3D allowing me to create more interesting buildings without worrying as much about perspective and size consistency, the designs can now be more complex than anything I’ve made before. Because of that, lineart and shading have now require more time given to them. I decided to study Toon and Line rendering in Maya to speed up this process. My aim is to be able to create finished concepts within the time of 3 days, which is industry standard. Day 1 is for ideation and base modeling, and days 2 and 3 are for rendering, painting, and presentation.

Step 1) Inspiration and Sketches

So my obsession with art nouveau is not over and I wanted to work on a simple design for this research project so I decided to make a gate or entrance that is inspired by the style.  Below you can see my Pureref images as inspiration and reference along with my initial sketches.

Step 2) Modeling

Here is the final base model in Maya. While it was fairly quick to put together, the little curly details add a lot of time to this. Overall it was less than one day’s worth of work, which is within the time budget. I placed a directional light to create shadows that will be visible in the render.   

Step 3) Rendering

Ok here we go. So in order to get started with Toon rendering, I have to set the Rendering menu bar and select Toon. 

On the drop down menu there are a few options, but first we have to give the model a Toon shader. I clicked on the gemstones and in the drop down menu I clicked “Assign Fill Shader” then gave them all the “Shaded Brightness Three Tone”

It is currently too cartoony for the look I want it to have so I went under Color> Interpolation and selected Spline for each color.

After messing around with different settings and colors, the gemstones ended looking like this.

I continued these steps with all the pieces and ended with these colors.

Next I went to create the linework. First I needed to select the pieces I wanted outlined, then Clicked Toon>Assign Outline>Add New Toon Outline.

At the default settings it is not very noticeable from this distance so I decided to change some settings to get this.

After messing with the line width and attributes, I ended up with these settings.

 I then went into the Maya Render View and Rendered the base pass as a PNG for the model.

Then through Arnold, I rendered the following passes: base, lighting, AO, normal, and UV.

I thought the UV render had cool gradients and could be useful.

Issue I ran into: I originally wanted to include a more illustrative style for the line render, specifically a style like this. 

I was trying to follow an article that explained how to create it made by Maya but I found it to be unclear about some things and could not figure out how to achieve this look on my model. I could not find another tutorial that covered this specific topic so I decided to head another route. 

I had several guesses as to why this was not working or me, excluding that the tutorial was not clear for me. I think the render style I was aiming for needed a much higher detail model than the one that I have, like something imported from Zbrush. If this is the case then it would be faster and easier for me to include these details in Photoshop than to export this to Zbrush, sculpt, and import again.
I also just had a lot of issues getting the Toon Render to show properly in Arnold

Step 4) Photoshop

After passing everything into Photoshop and giving the Arnold Render the right layer effects and opacity, it looked like this.

From here on, the remaining work had to be done by hand. Thankfully, the mixture of Toon and Arnold renders saved me a ton of time from having to do linework or rendering shadows, so now I just had to focus on creating textures and adding details.

Here it is finished!