Realism

After being put off cel shading I have done some research on realism and have found it to be very interesting and have found some inspiring work


Round 6 

This being a particular favourite of mine. The suspense created and information held from the viewer makes it a great teaser.

Sintel

Bang Bang You Are Bread

Ryan Woodward

I also found this series from Ryan Woodward and I again like the style and it has inspired one of my ideas that I had yesterday, I love the style and hope to reproduce something like it with CG and 2D backgrounds.

Ryan Woodward

This is a really powerful and moving animation, the moves are so fluid and natural. It's incredible work like this that inspires me to try something new, and hopefully will inspire a new storyline and new approach to animation for me.

Why Are the Good Ones Always Taken?

I thought I had a great idea...


I was trying to think of something that I haven't done before and something that would hopefully be funny.

So, I came up with this idea for a caveman who is trying to start a fire and things keep going wrong and whatever he does it goes wrong.

My initial idea was with the caveman starting a fire and setting his beard alight, then running to some water and throwing his head into it to put it out.  Then when he lifted his head up, a piranha would be biting his nose. He would then grab a stick and go to smack the piranha but it would jump out of the way and he would hit his face with the stick and all hilarity would ensue! 

At this point I did some research into existing cavemen animations for some inspiration to be brutally honest I found some very weak examples, but then I stumbled across this little gem

I think I can pretty much say it's been done...and well! Except the piranha has been replaced by leeches.


Back to the drawing board...how about dinosaurs...

Inspirations

It's also about time I started putting up some inspirational animations that I have found, so here goes...

This is a great little animation that makes me laugh every time! I love the simple style.

This has a great narration t start that leaves you in the dark as to what it's about, but i like the realism of the rendering and the storyline.

This is another that makes me laugh every time I watch it. The style and colours are great and the story is so simple. The animation is also great as they really understand the weighting and balance of the character.


There are many more so I'll add them in the coming posts

Not my Style

Ok, I have done a little more research and I don't think Cel Shaded is the way to go.  Simply because it isn't the style I want to achieve.  It seems to be used more for anime characters and designs and this isn't something that I am interested in. 
I might try and focus on a more realistic style and get my head around Vue 9 to achieve some great results.

I think it depends a lot on the storyline and characters as to the style I decide to go for. And at the moment I don't have many strong ideas.

I think I'll get my ideas more solid before deciding what style to use.

Cel Shading or Toon Shading

So here's how to cell shade in Maya...

you can do it with maya renderer and toon shader or mental ray and contour shader (whcihc is a bit more complicated but gives better results...

Using the standard Maya Renderer, not Mental Ray

- First light the scene with a standard three point lighting system so you have good lights to work with as opposed to Maya standard lights.  Then duplicate your geometry and rename one 'Cel' and the other 'Outline', then group these together so you can move them together and they won't become misaligned if you move them or rotate them.

- Assign the geometries to a new render layer each, named 'Cel' and 'Outline'.  This is so that they can be rendered separately and composited in After Effects giving you more control over the outcome.

- For the 'Cel' geometry assign a 'Fill Shader'.  Do this in the Rendering menu set ⇒ Toon ⇒ Assign Fill Shader ⇒ then choose Shaded Brightness Tone 2 or 3. In the Attribute Editor adjust the colour in the ramp shader to whatever is it you need the colour to be, and add more if you wish to give a wider tonal range. This is done by clicking in the colour box where you can slide the current colours left and right.

- Once you have the desired colour, you need to add an outline to the 'Outline' geometry.  First assign a Surface Shader and make it white. Then in the Rendering menu set ⇒ Toon ⇒ Assign Outline ⇒ Add New Toon Outline.  You can then edit the outline and crease lines in the Attribute Editor, it's best to adjust settings under the Common, Profile Lines, Crease Lines and Border Lines tabs to achieve the best results.

If you are making an animation, not just a still, all you do is composite the 2 layers in an editing software like After Effects and because of the alpha channels you can overlay the outline on top of the coloured layer.  Then play around with the hue and saturation and what not until you're happy with the results.
To get a nice outline you need to create your model in pieces, this then gives the outline shader more to work with and produce a better result.

I will go through rendering in players/passes and 3 point lighting in another post. 

I also need to research more about Cel Shading with Mental Ray, but when I know how I'll let you know!

I'll have a quick go with the Toon Shader and a model I found on the internet, then blog it up.

A lot of it is explained briefly here by Christophe Desse.