Toonshading.

Hey cats!
Here's my late Saturday night/Sunday morning post for the week. We've got some great and exciting news.

1. 12 days until due date.

2. Matt got an external hard drive, so now our project exists in three places. I pray that's enough to avoid a catastrophe this close to due date.

3. 90% of the backgrounds are completed and dropped into scene files. They look awesome, and we've been getting nothing but positive feedback from everyone we show. In addition to that, Matt's expected to finish phase one of the cleanup tonight. That excludes two particularly long sequences, but aside from that, all the cleanup will be done.

4. We've just about completed the biggest crapshoot step of the process. We're lazy, so we decided that instead of drawing a biplane, we would animate it in Maya and composite that into the ToonBoom file. Sounds great, but we had no idea how we were really gunna pull it off.

I guess we always knew we would toonshade it, but I was super skeptical about toonshading because I almost universally hate the effect. The shader creates a "2d" looking image, but the shadows/shading still moves like a 3d object, so it looks like crap. With that in mind, I came up with a solution that I think works pretty darn well.

Note: the BG in this scene is a temp. The David is also rough and uncolored. The plane effect is completed.

STEP 1:
We start with a simple model from Maya.



STEP 2:
From there, I use the toonshade effect in Maya. This makes all of the colors a flat tone. No shadows or gradients that are usually present in 3d images.

I intentionally rendered it as one tone. It is possible to render a toon-shadow, but as I ranted above, I think it looks cheap and crappy, and I found a better solution.



STEP 3:
This is where I was sold on toonshading. Rather than using the above-mentioned "3d shading," I imported the flat toonshaded biplane into ToonBoom and applied a "highlight" and a "tone" effect to the image, giving it shading/highlights that are consistent with the rest of the film and that move like a 2d image, rather than a 3d model.



This isnt the coolest render of the effect, but those ones would be spoiler-ish. Anyway, Matt and I are really happy with the effect, and we're even happier since most of those scenes are finished now. I've got two left, I think.

Speaking of scenes left, I'd better get back to work. Look forward to next week, because if we dont have some clips and/or a trailer to show, that means this film's f**ked.

-JJ