My Giant Robot!

So there's been some trial and error, and there's bound to be more, but here's a look at where I'm at with the Toon Shader. I have plenty of compositing to do to get the look I want - both with the appearance of the "neighborhood" as well as the background. Plus, my outlines (dark purple) are so thin and close together on the front porch, that they're flickering. Kind of annoying... Anyway, here's a glimpse of it in motion.

With the toon shader set up, I need to prepare each shot before rendering. So I had to place cameras in my 3d scene and pick my shots. Seems straight forward enough, but then you realize you can put the camera anywhere! So I focused on stringing a series of shots together that would best tell the story. The house robot gets up, sets off a car alarm, and kicks the car outta the neighborhood. Done. So here's a rough cut with 7 shots from 7 separate cameras in my scene... Click here to check it out - and here if you need Quicktime.

I'm playing with the new toon shader menu in Maya 7. This is just the "fill" colors for the house robot. Now I need to add the "outlines" which will make it easier to see the details of the porch, windows, door, etc. The purple outline is just a stroke in Photoshop. Anyway, next to the 3d model you can see where I sampled the color palette from Kendal's original drawing (and desaturated them a little). So far so good...

I originally intended to add photo-realistic visual effect shots to bring some of the kids ideas to life. For a variety of reasons, I'm planning to rethink this approach. For one, each child's imagination works differently - so why shouldn't each of their "dreamlands" look different too? And secondly, it's been almost four years and I need to finish this short film. Ha! So I think I can speed up the animation process a little by being more creative. Uh...and I quit my day job. Seriously. I'm committed to finishing this before the kids can drive to the premiere. Yikes.

So here's where I left off with Kendal's house robot. The blue/gray image shows the lighting pass in Mental Ray while the other shows a ROUGH composite of the textured house robot over the live action background plate. This is all about to change...