Entries in rendering (1)
Flagstaff character rendering
Monday, February 21, 2011 at 9:21AM All the characters and non-procedural environment graphics in Flagstaff are created in Blender, which you can download for free. Because I like to live dangerously, I use Blender 2.5 beta. If you're a chicken, I guess you can use the stable 2.4 version. Bok bok.
When figuring out the lighting and rendering settings for the characters, I started with a pretty basic setup of one sunlight, and ambient occlusion enabled.
This setup looked alright but the direction of the light source seemed too obvious, and I figured it would look strange in any environment that wasn't outdoors. I needed something a bit more neutral.
I played around with toon shaders to no success, then eventually settled on a solution using Blender's compositing nodes system to combine certain render passes and exclude those I didn't want. The final composite is a combination of the colour pass, and the shadow and environment passes at 20 and 25 percent opacity, respectively.
;)
The shadow layer gives some basic definition to the shapes. The environment layer provides distinction between adjacent shapes of similar colour, and also shows details like the fingers and toes.