Maya Experiments: Playing with Angles, Lighting & Shaders

Since last week's pitch we have been exploring how we can adapt our project's visual style to represent something closer to the animatic we had shown as this received more successful feedback than the style we had at that point.

I have experimented with a few things in maya firstly to see what effects I could achieve. Just from using a regular cube to apply the effects to with a plane in the background I have noticed that the effects worked better when the object was rotated a bit rather than flat on as there seemed to be more dimension. I also noticed that with a simple ambient light with the ambient shade put down to 0.1 unwanted shadows were removed creating a much more effective 'white space'. Lastly, toon shaders worked quite well both right up against the object but also offset. However, a thinner line was better in achieving a similar effect to our animatic.