This scene was primarily designed for a realtime toon rendering. Thus the modeling is very simple, with few polygons and square-looking shapes. Later on, I decided to render it as if it was a realistic scenery, featuring little toys.
First of all, I played with depth of field to suggest the small scale. Most of camera lenses can hardly shoot a sharp image of the whole scene, so the foreground and the background are often out of focus.
Secondly, I used the same texture basis on each material of the scene, to have a coherent overall look :
Figure above shows the process :
- Flat shaded geometry is usually dull. I needed something to texture the shadows : a hand-painted layer was camera-mapped onto the scene, with a slightly different angle than the viewpoint
- It’s very powerful because it’s more than a simple 2D layer and you can move freely around the viewpoint without too much distortion. But this layer is hoverwhelming if you don’t modulate it with the luminance of the initial render.
- Eventually, I just did some levels tweaking to get colored shadows and obtain a far more interesting result.
These are the techniques involved in the creation of this scene. Everything in this process is done with animation in mind, so that I could easily redo it on an image sequence.
- Textured scene + shadow map spotlight
- HDRI-based skydome
- Composite of the 2 previous passes
- Color corrections