#Toony colors pro maya tutorial how to#

The reason being that it spared me from worrying about light setup’s, advanced render settings and displacement/normal maps. This will keep your structure simple and easy to navigate in.įor these assets, I chose to paint in all light and shadow. Note that you want all the layers you paint on to be ‘clipped’ to the mask at the bottom of your group.

From here on, it’s a back and forth process between painting and smudging until you’re satisfied. Furthermore, it’ll leaves behind a bit of texture creating that nice, painterly effect. This brush is optimized for the tool, so you won’t get any of the lag you’d normally experience when using smudge. Once you have something decent looking, it’s time to switch to the smudge tool using the “Smudge Blender” brush. At this stage, you shouldn’t worry about precision at all as it is simply about applying some nice gradients and bold colours. Next, I quickly paint some rough gradients and colour vibration using my “Awesome Paint 1″ brush (it really is awesome). Here’s when the fun part begins – painting! I begin by applying a flat base colour to everything using the Paint Bucket Tool. Another important thing to note, is to always make your masks a couple of pixels wider than the actual UV shell, otherwise you might run into issues with Maya displaying black edges around the seems. This approach will allow you to create clipping masks for each group so you don’t have to worry about ‘colouring within the lines’. I create a mask for all UV shells and group them into appropriate subgroups, in this case: bird, wing, thighs and legs. When I’m happy with my UV’s, I take a UV Snapshot, import it into Photoshop and begin to set up the workflow. Once I’m happy with my model, I’ll UV it in Maya and unfold using the “Unfold 3D” and “Smooth UV” tools. From a very early stage, I check my silhouette by hitting the “use flat lighting” view option. This particular model was created as part of a larger illustration piece, so it was modelled in front of an image plane to resemble the concept as closely as possible. Some people might prefer ZBrush, which is certainly more efficient for complex organic shapes, but for something as basic as this, I personally prefer using Maya because it simplifies my workflow. Since it would be quite difficult to paint without a model to paint on, the first step is to block out your model using Maya. I will explain my workflow and the importance of simplicity when texturing as well as share my resources so you can experiment with the techniques yourself.

#Toony colors pro maya tutorial how to#

Furthermore, we’ll have a brief look at how to create a toony finish in Maya using quick and easy methods for fast results. This tutorial will take you through my process of creating stylized and painterly textures using Photoshop.

She published this tutorial on her own blog and allowed us to republish it. Learn how to create stylized, hand-painted textures for your 3D models in Photoshop with this tutorial by Sketchfab community member Emilie Stabéll.