Maya Render: How to imitate faceted, super low-poly look

Brian "Panda" Choi

Question: What terms am I looking to Google to figure out how to render a faceted character out like this artist: https://instagram.com/jonadinges/

Or does anyone already know of a place that explains how to render like the above in Maya?

Client is looking to do the same style, and pump out sprite sheets similar to "Clash of Clans."

Sukotto

I'm not sure I understand your question but It just looks like he's hardening all the normals and carefully placing lights, maybe has an ambient occlusion dome or a sky light. I don't think there's any technically trickery going on here though

Fingus

Yeah nothing fancy, just harden all the normals and have good lighting. You'll might want to triangulate the geometry, and selectively leave some edges soft for aesthetic reasons.

Brian "Panda" Choi

@Sukotto: An AO pass is what I might be wanting.

JedTheKrampus

You could always do some sort of decimation or reduce before the triangulation as well, depending on what sort of mesh it is. Decimating a low-poly mesh would work well for props especially, and if you put a reduce node in before you deform a character with a medium polycount it might look cool in the animation.

Brian "Panda" Choi

To clarify, I am not confused about the hardening edges, but more confused about how to render in Mental Ray that "look" beyond just the faceted, specific normals for each face on the model.