flour sack toonified!!! (not really WIP, just for fun)
 

I was feeling unproductive this evening, so I decided to goof around with Maya's vector renderer and decided to render out my floursack animation as a toon. Not too bad. :)

Here's the .SWF file: http://www.dannyngan.com/gallery/flo...nce_vector.swf

i love that flour sack :D he so cute :D

Awesome toon mate=)

Jolly!

Hehe - lovely!

How exactly did you get that toon effect?

great motion :)

wheres the funky music!!!! I can watch that for hours m8!

@everyone: Glad you all like it. I'm not totally happy with some of the shading glitches, but I suppose I could crank up the polys to get a smoother mesh. He's fairly low-poly at the moment. ;)

@JimmyC: I used Maya 5's vector renderer to get the toon effect. First I applied a Phong shader to the floursack. Then I adjusted the vector render settings in the Render Globals panel until I liked the results. I used a single color fill with a 4 point outline. Then, I rendered directly to a Shockwave Flash file. That's it! :)

Looks cool :)

wow thats awesome! somewhat reminds me of something that cud come from Disney's Fantasia (Mickey commanding the mop). Thats sweet, i love it.

I really should upgrade to Maya 5. Is there anyway to get this effect in 4.5 easily? I've tried a few plugins but none seem that effective.

I've been trying to get a good toon effect for a project i'm doing but so far I can only get it to look pretty rough. I really want a clean look like yours.

@JimmyC,

One possibility for getting a toon look without plugins is to create a shader with a ramp texture mapped to the color channel. You can then connect a Sampler Info node's Facing Ratio to the Ramp's V Coordinate. From there, you can edit the ramp texture to get the right balance of outline and color fill. It's not quite a easy to work with as a toon shader or Maya 5's vector renderer, but it's something.

One thing I've found is that the mesh's shape plays an important part in getting a good toon shade look with Maya's vector renderer. Clean surfaces with good silhouettes tend to render as toons better than intricately detailed objects. The bugs in my other WIP post are good examples of that. Simple shapes with clean outlines. I think the results are pretty good. :)

Yeah, I noticed the same thing with the plugin's I've been using. They seem to work a lot better on NURBS that Poly's aswell.

I did think about using the ramp shader method, but I need to use a few textures on my characters, and i don't think it's possible to do that with that method.

I should have a copy of Maya 5 later today anyway, so i'll mess around with that and see what I can come up with.

Pretty cool! How did you make the .swf file? Can you do it directly from within Maya 5? (I'm still on 4.5)