Premise: Maya Experiments

I decided to do some lighting and shading experiments, as I didn't know whether I wanted to do a 'Toon shader' look on my short, and because tone and lighting are important to convey the emotion that the main character is feeling in the scenes.

To start off with, I made one of my desk props that I'd previously designed in Maya. I then coloured it using the hypershade tools.

I started my experiments by looking at the Toon options after speaking to Terry about how to get them to work. 

To start with setting up the shaders so that they appear properly in the Maya Software renderer, I had to turn off the 'colour management' setting on the scene.

I then adjusted the render settings.

I then used the 'Smooth' tool and set the subdivisions to 2 on all of the geometry so that it would retain a smooth-looking appearance even when the objects themselves aren't smoothed. I also added in a directional light to the scene so the shadows would appear and the object could be seen in the render viewport.

Once I finished setting it up, I applied the 'Light Angle' Toon shaders and changed the object and shadow colours. 

I then added on Toon lines, but since they were black they weren't very visible in the viewport. To get around this, I screenshotted my Maya window.

I then changed the colours of the lines.

Going back to my original file and saving out another copy, I decided to see if I could apply Toon lines to a normally-shaded model. I did this by repeating the subdivision changes, and then adding the Toon lines to the object.

I then moved on to looking at directional lights combined with a skydome to get different types of effects on the scenes. I added both lights into the scene and placed a place underneath my object.

I changed the shadows on the directional light to be slightly more blue-tinted in the first experiment, and put a grey hue onto the skydome. This gave me a dark and somewhat de-saturated tone to my scene, which would possibly work if pushed further for the scenes in which this tone is used.

I then changed the lights to look brighter with red-pink undertones to create a softer feel to the scene, which would work for the beginning and end of the short.