Half year project Ink'n paint

It is time to talk a bit about some of our visual style. When we began this project we didn’t have a great idea of how the visual style would look like, For our characters we have desited to go with a rayman kind of style were there are no connections between the hands and feet, nor to the eyebrows, it all floats in the air around the character, but the do stay roughly in place ofcourse.


But the most defining element of our visual style are our material choose.
 

We decided almost right of the bat to go with the material Ink’n paint, with it we get an outline of all the objects in the scene and it also changes how lighting effects it, the paint levels in ink’n paint also help give the film a nice cartoony stile to it.

                                                Early version of the sphere, not the final result.

 Most of the time we don’t need to make much variation from the materials on different objects, all got an falloff (shadow/light) on them with the same amount of paint levels. If the object got a texture to it we don’t change out the falloff, but add the bitmap inside of the falloff. 

Some of the changes we do need to do are to take in mind of the distance of the object to the camera, as the thickness of the ink outline of the objects will stay the same no matter how far away you put the object, so it may end up covering up the object and all you got is a black dot in the scene if the ink is to thick. 

Another problem that is relevant to the distance from the camera are ink overlap and ink material id, both of them may cause that an object can get lines and often cause big black areas on the objects if the object are to distanced without the correct settings, something that causing the need to have multiple materials to similar objects in the scene depending on where that are located.