Yiyang Huang

Editable Toon Shading Tool in Maya

Summary

This project aimed to build a artist-friendly tool which could edit details of toon shading. Users could add desired light or shadow area on a basic 2-step toon shading. In this way, normal or geometry doesn’t need to be modified manually to obtain desired shading effect, especially solve the issues on real-time rendering. The shaded areas were controlled by editable locators, which were added by users over the geometry, and relevant parameters for each locator. The whole system worked like light projection on geometry surface but used dynamic lit-sphere model to build its own texture coordination. Maya was selected to implement this tool in order to provide a good preview during animation making. The tool in Maya was developed as a plug-in. All the parameters of each locator defined would be passed to the shader node and the shading effect was then drawed by hardware rendering. The project is kept developing. Keyframe interpolation and pipeline towards game engines (Unity and Unreal) could be added in future work.

Thesis Editable Toon Shading Tool in Maya

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