topic Re: Help with low-poly shaders in Maya Shading, Lighting and Rendering Forum

Help with low-poly shaders

Anonymous — Thu, 13 Apr 2017 22:52:51 GMT

I'm looking to create a shader like this one, only not in Unity, but in Maya. I have little experience with shaders in Maya, and am finding it very difficult to find many resources on how to approach something like this (below) - everything I've found is for Cinema4d or Unity.

If anyone could walk me through how to do it, or point me in the direction of a tutorial that already does, I'd be deeply appreciative!

Thank you!

http://polyknightgames.com/world-building-shaders-and-aesthetics/

Re: Help with low-poly shaders

mspeer — Fri, 14 Apr 2017 03:12:50 GMT

Hi!

If i search for Toon Shader in Maya Documentation / Online Help the first item found is Ramp Shader, exactly what you need!?

http://help.autodesk.com/view/MAYAUL/2017/ENU/?guid=GUID-022F69B8-B1A3-46A3-9917-0D9CBDBB6733

Re: Help with low-poly shaders

Anonymous — Sun, 16 Apr 2017 02:09:44 GMT

Thank you! Yes - I think that's a start, but I need a bit more direction, if you can help!

This guy - Eran Hilleli is a great representation of what I'm hoping to do.

I have low poly models, but I don't want to have shadows directly follow the rough geometry. Look at how the light passes smoothly over the face without making each large face of the mesh super obvious.

More examples:

The gradients:

The soft shadows and the haze:

And one more for good luck:

Just wondering if you might be able to hone in more closely on how to achieve this kind of shader aesthetic.

Re: Help with low-poly shaders

Anonymous — Sun, 16 Apr 2017 02:14:33 GMT

And here's an example of what I don't want:

Notice how the light and shadows show exactly where every face of the mesh is. Not subtle. Not a bad aesthetic, but not what I'm looking for.

Re: Help with low-poly shaders

mspeer — Sun, 16 Apr 2017 13:44:11 GMT

Hi!

Mesh Display -> Soften Edge

Re: Help with low-poly shaders

Anonymous — Mon, 17 Apr 2017 00:09:23 GMT

Hmm, I'm not sure that's it. If you look at the examples, there are some pretty sharp edges in there on occasion. It seems less like a mesh thing and more like a shader thing, to my eye at least.

Re: Help with low-poly shaders

mspeer — Mon, 17 Apr 2017 05:05:19 GMT

Hi!

See my first reply about shader.

Re: Help with low-poly shaders

joostkonemann — Mon, 17 Apr 2017 10:00:52 GMT

Indeed, use a ramp shader in which you use hard transitions from one colour to the next.

If you want to use Arnold, which does not support the ramp shader (as far as I know); you can use for instance a aiStandard, from the aiStandard you pipe one of the color out components through a remapValue node into a the V coord of a ramp texture node (delete the placement node), from which you pipe the output in an aiUtility node set to 'flat' shade mode. In the ramp you can set your colours.

See screenshot for the shader node graph and the result.

Re: Help with low-poly shaders

Anonymous — Thu, 17 May 2018 09:28:41 GMT

I Ran into the same problem.

the answer is easier then you think

Heran Hilleli Examples shows that he uses Spot light and not one with soft edges - like area or point

and that keep the sharp light edge

Example - on the right I put Spot light/On the left side there is point light