What is it about?
Toon shading often gives poor results on 3D characters. Rotoscoped shadows used in film aren't real-time for games. Current toon shaded games use painted/textured/baked shadows that don't change with lighting. Shading Rig is a new workflow to animate artist-defined shading with lighting changes, and preserve art-direction in real-time toon shaded games. We achieve this with a "rig" of shadow editing primitives designed based on fundamental artistic shading principles. These primitives can be animated to achieve highly stylised shading under dynamic lighting.
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Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash
Why is it important?
With Shading Rig, stylised games can now offer free camera control and character movement, while dynamically maintaining the visual appeal of hand-drawn concept art. New live digital media benefit in the same way, including virtual production and virtual avatars/YouTubers. Offline 3D animation and also use Shading Rig to minimise post-production time largely spent cleaning up toon shading in 3D animation.
Perspectives
I've always wanted games and animation to have the same charm and visual appeal of their hand-drawn concept art. I think Shading Rig is a first step in imbuing the hand of the artist into 3DCG rendering, dynamically and in real-time.
Lohit Petikam
Victoria University of Wellington
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Shading Rig: Dynamic Art-directable Stylised Shading for 3D Characters, ACM Transactions on Graphics, October 2021, ACM (Association for Computing Machinery), DOI: 10.1145/3461696.
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