Had a talk with marco:
Good to know that it is cool that I took the time to explore my options, but I do agree that it is now heading to a point where I need to make a hard decision regarding the environment style- 2D or 3D.
Both results are good and it would be a shame not to use both somehow.
Marco suggested perhaps exploring parallax in After Effects with 2D assets
Another suggestion is to explore doing my 2D hand-drawn style, and overlay the 3D version for its lighting and shadows.
My next step is to work on finishing blocking for one if not all of my scenes by next week; progress forward, on my character animation.
I would like to explore if I could do more of the simulations that I aim to have in my other scenes.
I planned to set up cameras for my animated scenes and render the images as a background (BG) to draw my animation on. For part 1, scenes 1-8 BG shots were taken.
I had difficulty setting the camera in a way so as to make it feel like a smaller camera- increase field of depth (FOD) and scale of objects in addition to warping the perspective.
I was able to achieve this effect by utilising the “near clip” attribute and adjusting the FOD accordingly.
Scenes such as scene 2 and scene 9 are difficult because the FOD is close to an orthographic but isn’t an orthographic itself.
The fisheye camera has been useful in providing a subtle(?) warp to the perspective that in my opinion feels more immersive, like its an actual POV of a person.
On a similar note, I am currently experimenting to see if it is possible to set the near clip attribute of the camera to a bounding box -similar to deform shaders with their bounding box- so that I can achieve more easier ways of setting the mise-en-scene according to the animatic and live action reference that I have.
Lights seems like to bleed through the faces, affecting and forming shadows beyond the intended mesh of the shadow.
Early on, I also experimented with more lighting options and I came across the mix shader, allowing me to implement two different shading options to objects. When I attempted to do so, this gave me the option of providing visible light rights while also having the Toon shader effect on my objects. This appealed to me as I could perhaps create rays of light blasting through the window and other things, to make it feel more… realistic? Immersive? Unfortunately I haven’t been able to replicate it so far as fiddling with the nodes have left me confused on how they exactly work- what the relationship is, what affects what, what results in what, etc.
I have looked at tutorials on how to make godrays/rays of lights and it seems like a simple addition of area lights, adjust light intensity, and increase the density value of the aiAtmosphere shader to a value other than 0, such as 0.001. This effect didn’t occur when the realistic lights were present in my scene due to the mix shader. I could possibly experiment more with this since the purpose in doing so is to achieve the effect of ‘realistic’ lighting in a way that doesn’t require me to do so in post-production editing. Perhaps I am being stubborn in this regard but I feel like achieving it through the latter way carries its own separate set of technical problems.
Gobo light filter seems like an easy solution but it isn’t available on my computer so I will need to test that out on the computers at university.
On a similar note, I also fiddled with the base tonemap ramp since I noticed that the shadows weren’t really being picked up or that they aren’t as pronounced or accurate. In the current the progress that I have, I have achieved having the areas of the two different lights overlap, distinctly forming lighter/darker shades based on the area of overlap/separation. The problem in this state is that some really dark areas form which, based on the tonemap ramp denotes that there isn’t any light present in that area; but the viewport says otherwise.
Since using the mix shader with two different toon (surface) shaders achieved this affect, I will possibly experiment in the future with the layer shader. This shader can supposedly apply up to 8 different shaders onto an objects, and adjust the blend effect between its different shaders.
Links used:
Update:
Kinda fixed the problem with the shadows in overlapping lights in toon shader. I increased the aiRadius to 0.3 and it kind of blends the lights, makes it more…gradient-like. The different colours are still distinct but not so much compared to before the value change, so perhaps I would adjust the tonemap accordingly to see if that would affect anything.
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