I wanted to seamlessly infuse the aesthetics and charm of 2D animation to the project while keeping it a 3D animated film. This was achieved using aiToonshader in Maya.
The intention behind this was to keep the spirit of the project artistic and break away from realistic rendering, applying the aiToonshader was relatively easy but the challenge lay in keeping the visuals and width of the lines consistent in between each shot. Toonshader determines the width of each line depending on the distance of the camera to the subject and the distance of the camera is different in each shot and adding camera movement further complicates this resulting on varying line width in each shot. Some thicker and some shots with thinner lines.
To make it look consistent the toonshader settings were tailored to each shot individually and were rendered multiple times, some shots that had camera movement were rendered multiple time with different settings and edited together to keep the line width consistent.
The process and technique used is as following:
- Select an object assign new material, arnold toonshader
- Adjust the settings add color and ai ramprgb tonemap where appropriate
- Repeat the process for each part of the character