As a rendering artist for Slice of Heaven, I have to do many experiments to find out which style is suitable for our film. We came to an agreement that the final look of the film should adopt a watercolour style. Therefore, the experiments done aimed to achieve watercolour effects .

 

First, I started off with using toon shader (3 tone shader) on all objects. All objects are rendered in a single layer, then composited in Nuke. 

Rendered image from Maya

Final image after compositing in Nuke

I realised that there is a lack of control by using one single layer for all the objects in the scene. For the next experiment, I separated the each objects into different render layers. 

I have greater control now, but it does not have watercolour effect. So I moved on to see if I could create watercolor textures on the models. 

I tried to create my own shader using hypershade. The texture was not to our liking so we did not use it in the end. 

Graph network for the shader I've created

To achieve a watercolor look, I tried using paint effects in Maya. I painted randomly on the model using different watercolour brushes in Maya, then I proceed to add more textures in Nuke. 

Maya scene setup

Screengrab from rendered animation

 

 

By using paint effects and nuke, we are now one step closer to achieving watercolor style. After that, however, we encountered another problem: The textures on the character are not moving with the character. We also find that the textures are too distracting. 

After that, I separated each element into different render layers. For example, the hair has 2 layers, one for colour and another for shadow. I could add noise in Nuke to create a watercolor effect. 

Both of us are pleased with the final outcome, so we decided to render it using this method.