Replicating Team Fortress 2 Shader in Maya/ Arnold?

hyanimka

I'm currently working on a short animated project and I'm trying to go for the TF2 illustrative rendering style. I've looked at the white paper that was published but I'm finding it difficult to understand and replicate in Maya and Arnold Renderer since rendering and shaders are not my strong point.

The aiToon shader in Arnold comes slightly close to the TF2 style but it just doesn't have that same feel/look to the games. Does anyone have any step-by-step tutorials or general advice on how to achieve the look using Maya/Arnold shaders?

Klunk

blimey this is a blast from the past

it's basicly an npr shader with a specular with a fresnal falloff (ie at acute angles gives a "specular edge")
the npr part is the standard lighting equation used as a look up into texture  that gives us the output lighting.
a linear texture would give us an unchanged result but we can "squeeze" the output in a narrow range....


i include a max fx shader as an interpretation of the team fortress one may give you some pointer to your own implementation

in the max viewport

hyanimka

Thank you! Just to clarify, does the specular have a fresnel falloff?

Klunk

there's a normal phong specular with an additional fresnal rim spec term  they are combined in the final lighting with max(phong, rim_spec)... there's and an additional rim lighting term also though i don't remember it's effect

blimey there are some weird shit going on when I save the .fx as .txt !