Maya Technical Paper How to Create Toon Outlines in Maya.

Unit 3: Transcription The French Confection Sasha Hart

This Technical paper is an explanation of how to use the Toon Outline, its settings and how to render it out.

Set Up
After creating you model, the first thing you need to do is to create a new render layer. Rename the render layer to Line Effect this will help you to know what each render layer is producing. Then duplicate the model and add the duplicated model to the new layer

Fig.1 Final Building Model Now you should have the dupilcated model in the Line Effect layer you just created, next thing to do is to go to the hypershader, select the whole model and ground plane, then add a surface shader material. Optionally, you could also set the background colour to black so when you render the image the toon outline will only appear. This can be done by going to view>selectcamera> Arribute Editor> Environment>Background colour

Fig.2 Hypershader adding a Surface shader material

Now you will only be able to see the toon outline when you render the image. This will also allow for you to composite the rendered image over the beuty pass and abiment oclussion renders in either After Affects or Photoshop. Next select the duplicate model in the outliner, then to go the rendering settings > Toon> Assign Outline> Add new outline. This will automaticly add a gertic toon outline.

Fig.3 Assigning Toon Outline Now that the toon outline has been added there are serveral setting that need to be chage to get the best effect. In the outliner selected pfxToon1 this is the toon outline that you just created. This should then take you to the to the toon outline in the attribute editor. Figure 4 Shows excellty what should be on your screen. Firstly you will have to turn off both Profile Lines and Border Lines. Below you will need to turn on Crease Lines and then below that is the Line width which is were you will be able to change the outlines size/thinkness.

Fig.4 pfxToon1 Attribute Settings

Next scole down the pfxToon1 setting until the Crease line tab appears and then expand the tab so you will be able to see the following settings. First is Crease Colour, where you be able to change the colour of the outline. Next is Crease Line Width which is again where you will be able to change the thickness of the outine. An suitable crease line width is 0.200. The other setting Crease Width Modulation>Crease Break Angle> Crease Angle Min> Crease Angle Max change to 0.000.

Fig.4 pfxToon1 Attribute Settings Extend Now that you have change the settings, the next thing to do is to decided what exacatly needs an outline and what does not. This can be done by softening and hardening the edges of the model. If you would to hardern the edges the outline would appear and if you were smoothed the edges they will not be part of the outline. To do this select the edge then go to either Polygons> Normals> Harden Edge or Polygons>Normals> Soften Edge Now that the toon outline has been added and the settings have been change, you are ready to render the image.

Fig. 5 Final Toon Outline

Rendering

So when rendering out the Line Effect you will have to make sure that you are rendering using Maya software. Also if you are batch render with hardware and metal ray than you will have to override the render. This allows for you to batch render everything at the same.

Fig.6 Render Settings

After you have rendered the image you should have image that looks a lot like this, which looks like a line drawing.

Fig. 7 Final Toon Render If you would to take this final render and composited both the beauty pass and ambient occlusion pass.

.You final composition should look something like this.

Fig.10 Final Composition