Week 6: Toon Shaders / Outlines and Environment Concepting in Maya

For environmental concepting, I definitely hands-down prefer Maya. Maya just makes everything super simple and its easy for me to throw together what I need to have everything I want in my environments.

I worked with my capstone team (Alex and Claire) to generate roughly 15 assets total between us to build our environments. The environment I was assigned was the Warehouse where the main boss will be located.

I definitely enjoyed this assignment more than the ZBrush assignment. It was enjoyable working with my teammates to make sure we were all creating assets that could be seen and feel appropriate in the environment.

I was in charge of Lanterns, Neon Signs, Street Signs and Boxes, but I also helped make some structural things for myself, such as the beams.

Alex did the small garbage heaps, trash cans, lids and wine barrels.

Claire created two sets of doors and windows that can be viewed in my scenes.

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Learning the toon shader was great! I cannot wait to play around and use that more often. I did run into lag issues in my scene with the toon outline however. Even when I turned the Toon Outline off, it created some headache trying to figure that out.

The last part which I acknowledge I need to learn better is lighting. I was not quite sure what was too much lighting, or what is lighting appropriate for a toon-shaded environment since the lighting becomes naturally very harsh.

Here are the individual environments for a closer look: