Mya’s Room
M.F.A Thesis Project
”Non-Photorealistic Rendering: Impressionism of modern CG animation”
PBR Shading
with AiStandard Shader
Lighting
The final lighting set.
The area lights are used to create lights that flow into the room from the windows, and the spot light is used to create the drop light around the desk area.
Layers
On the top of the Beauty pass, an Ambient Occlusion (AO) pass is multiplied to enhance the contrast. Then the atmosphere and God Rays are added to create the air effect.
Compositing
AOVs are merged with noise and ramp to enhance the effect. I also invert the alpha channel to create a little bit glowing effect around the windows.
Toon Shading
with AiToon Shader
Toon Pass
What Toon shader actually does is similar to multiplying the tone map shading on top of the original object color. Instead to assign different shader to every individual object. We can assign one toon shader to the entire scene, then merge it with albedo pass by using Nuke or Photoshop. This would make the project easier to manage and speed up the rendering time.
Edge Width
There are many ways to modify the width of the contours. aiFacingRation node is a common way to achieve it naturally. By connecting it to Width Scaling, the artists can create dynamic line weight with aiToon shader.
Layers
I used AOVs to separate the layers and used the alpha channel to generate the glowing effect around the windows.
Compositing
Except for the four layers above, I also imported the atmosphere I made in the PBR shading test and added some noise pattern to push the atmosphere.
HalfTonE Shading
with AiToon Shader & OSL
OSL
By using aiOSLshader, we can import different custom OSL scripts into Arnold. Here I used a custom OSL script provided officially on the Arnold website. It provides a friendly interface which can be easily used with aiToon shader.
Halftone Shader
We can use Ramp node to create and merge more different layers in one aiToon shader to create more stylized effect.
Halftone PASS
I decided to adopt the method I used with the aiToon shader: rendering a pure shading pass and combining it with the albedo pass by compositing.
Compositing
The compositing design of my halftone shading is similar to the aiToon shading. I merged the halftone pass with the albedo, then added effects like atmosphere, glow and color correction one by one.
Painterly Shading
with MNPRX
MNPRX
MNPRX provides a friendly way to add paint effect on the custom shader. I applied a watercolor base and enhanced the dry brush effect to generate the effect on the right.
Frayed Shader
I still want to push
the style further to present the interesting feature of painterly shading. I switched to the Frayed shading. This shading allows me to use the new frayed parameters to modify the distortion level of the shaders. I can even break the edges of the 3D object to merge them together.
Halftone PASS
In order to enhance the painterly effect, I ,merged a water color style pass with a frayed blur pass. This will add depth and glow to the original render.
Compositing
Then, I wanted to push the lighting depth in this rendering. I decided to modify the toon pass in the former section and use it here as well. To match with the frayed effect of this image, I used the iDistort node to generate the frayed version of the toon pass. Steps like Alpha glow and color correct are also applied here to adjust the result.