OUAN504 - Maya Experimentation & Colour, Characters

Very early on in the project when the concept and initial decision to involve pigs in the production had been established, Mat showed me how to make an incredibly simple pig using only a couple of polygons and adapting them slightly. This was at a stage when the narrative wasn't fully developed and the idea was to use pigs as background or minor characters, whereas the main characters would be humans in the form of farmers for example. The kind of shapes he showed me demonstrated how despite not being hugely detailed or over complicated, possessed a certain charm and style to them that I thought was quite nice. Furthermore, they were instantly recognisable as pigs due to the roundness of the body, proportions and then the colouring of the model. I suppose in a way this demonstrated to me that work doesn't always have to be super refined in order to convey a character or story, and in turn invoke an emotional response. During this initial idea generation process it was useful to experiment a little in Maya. This is also the stage in the production where I was still very new to Maya and learnt to use the toon shader option on objects in order to give them a nice colouring, which can also interact with light and shadows - as in the example shown, the physical sun and sky. This is something that Wing and I decided quite early on that we wanted to use for our characters to allow them to look less realistic, and also to allow the characters to interact on the surface with the type of lighting we wanted to include. Combining for an overall, greater cinematic experience.



I took the opportunity to look at different colour schemes to see which worked best. Using what I knew about the toon shader feature and how to modify the different attributes I experimented and explored some of the possible combinations of colours that we could use for the final models. The different samples below are made up of mostly three and four colours, whereas the final colour scheme we went for consisted of five colours. I was trying to see what worked best, ranging from earthy skin tones, with browns and beiges, to lighter colours such as pinks, whites and reds. I think Wing and I both agreed that the less brighter colours complimented the characters better and more importantly would be able to fit nicely into the environment which was also consisting mostly of browns and other tertiary colours. So being able to place the characters into the environment was important to us. Here is a record of the positions of colours used for the final character, as well as their colours in RGB format - written down in Wing's notebook.

R=0.392	R=0.490	R=0.580	R=0.941	R=0.961
G=0.314	G=0.340	G=0.379	G=0.817	G=0.879
B=0.308	B=0.327	B=0.366	B=0.684	B=0.791

Below is the experimentation I did on five separate models of the 'smart pig' in the story which was the pig I was allocated to do the rigging for. I tried a range of colour combinations on the toon shader ranging from light to dark with an array of different colours, so pinks, oranges and browns. Furthermore I wanted to see how the characters with the toon shader attribute looked under the physical sun and sky. At first they looked quite flat respite the shadows and lighting. To improve this I altered the 'diffuse' option by increasing the value and this helped the aesthetic of the characters to move away from looking flat and ultimately looked a lot better due to the distribution of the light. One thing I liked in particular is the effect the bag gave off when the dark brown toon shader was combined with the physical sun and sky. The bag along with the character model gave off a really nice matte texture, which I was pleased with.