With the two 3D characters mostly-completed, it was time to construct 3D props for them to interact with and to serve the environment around them. As these were based on simple geometry and lacked the complexity of the characters, these were created in Maya rather than ZBrush, although UVLayout and Substance Painter was still utilised to create the UV maps and textures. Textures and colours are not final as they may be altered further into production.
These props have been designed primarily for the fundraising scene, which consists of the cookie stall that Troy's friend sits at, the cookie packets themselves, the cookie sign that Troy holds, and the picket fence and the street light that are part of the environment. The cookie graphic was created by me in Adobe Illustrator.
For now, these props are the important ones that are vital for the scene. I will probably create more to populate the environment throughout the making of the documentary.
Setting up the renderer to output cell-shading turned out to be more problematic than expected. For one thing, applying Maya's default toon shader did output a nice result, but it compromised the use of textures, and thus my character models would be colourless if I went with that route. Additionally, the Arnold render was said to have a new shader called aiToon that could add cell-shading. This could not be used as the Maya version I could use didn't have the latest iteration of Arnold.
Luckily, through this tutorial, I was able to construct a custom-built Facing-Ratio shader by connecting specific nodes to an aiStandardSurface material, as shown in the screenshot above, which include an aiColourCorrect, a ramp, and an aiFacingRatio. Through extensive tweaking and another mock-up screenshot (below), I was able to render nice-looking shades onto the models, giving the much-needed depth I was wanting. The only downside to this is that the textures don't appear in the real-time viewport, so to make things easier, I'd have to constantly switch between the standard Maya materials and the custom Arnold shader materials, which can be a nuisance.
