Making a Toon-like Environment help?

Hayden Zammit

I've been playing Tales of Vesperia on the 360 lately and the graphics have blown me away. I want to make some scenes using the same sort of art style. The modeling looks like it would be easy enough. I've got some links: http://au.xbox360.ign.com/dor/objects/14225689/tales-of-vesperia/images/tales-of-vesperia-images-20080227103211253.html

http://au.xbox360.ign.com/dor/objects/14225689/tales-of-vesperia/images/tales-of-vesperia-images-20080227103159738.html

http://au.xbox360.ign.com/dor/objects/14225689/tales-of-vesperia/images/tales-of-vesperia-20080416012507939.html

http://au.xbox360.ign.com/dor/objects/14225689/tales-of-vesperia/images/tales-of-vesperia-20080416012453596.html

Would it be the texturing that is the main hurdle? I'm not going to use a game engine to put it into, just renders in Maya.

Mark Dygert

Cool style, I see what you mean.

Are you interested in doing the characters or the enviro art?
If its characters depending on the toonshader/method you use, it could make modeling difficult too.
The character shader I'm thinking of, lets you specify a light color for highlights and a dark color for shadows then gives you steps between. It also plugs in a bump that you can use falloff on so normals appear at angles and never really straight on.

If its enviro art, it looks like your in for a lot of hand painting.

malcolm

Cool style. Like Vig said it just looks like a bunch of hand painted textures on the environment side. I would add the light rig is very low contrast which will help you sell that anime hand drawn look. Most of the world looks prett flat in terms of lighting so keep that in mind of you're going to render out a scene. The smaller foliage doesn't even cast shadow, could be a limitation o the engine but generally I think if you lit this game with a higher contrast value it would look noisy and kill the hand painted textures.

Hayden Zammit

I'm starting to make progress on this piece. The scene is Caesar's office from Roman history.

Does it look like they are using normals at all in the game? I've tried smoothing edges in Maya but it seems to cast unwanted occuslion on the model around certain edges.

cheers.

Allert

If you want to have a realtime shader in maya, use http://www.mentalwarp.com/~brice/brdf.php it lets you add BRDF textures to mimic cellshading, or any type of shading for that matter. Only downside, it will only work with one lightPos. You can even do a hardware render, which means you don't have to use a 3rd party cell/toon renderer or whatever.

Lamoot

Perhaps this method could offer some inspiration? They also mention this being possible in real-time.

http://www.outside-hollywood.com/siggraph/

Justin Meisse

Pretty cool link Lamoot! Maybe I'm wrong but that technique would require some sort of real-time tessellation and displacement mapping? Are there any games/engines that do this yet or is it still the realm of tech demos?