I’m using a single directional light, coming from behind the camera, pointed slightly down.

Both “cast shadows” and “receive shadows” are ON for the character. Without them the shading looked really flat. The reason you don’t see Moom’s shadow on the floor is that he was rendered separately, in his own render layer.

In the Bee Chase scene, I did render his shadow, but even that was a separate layer that was comped in AE. Gave me more control over the darkness of the shadow that way.

The shader in the Bee Chase scene is identical to this one. However, I did post-process it differently while compositing. The render looked too hard-edged, so I softened it in AE by duplicating the layer, applying a slight blur on the top copy and playing with the blending modes.

Try the lighting and shadow attributes on your Grim Reaper. Feel free to post an image on your blog and send me a link if you’d like any feedback. Love those trees btw! Great flowing shapes.

@Leon, Samyuktha:
Thanks! Let me know if you try it out.

just a few small questions.

would mind explaining your lighting set up? is it just one directional light coming from the direction of the camera or up above?

do you turn off receive shadows on the model.

also, are you going to go over the tweaks between this shader and the one from the bee chase?

I tested out the shader on a grim reaper character, not getting the greatest results, but it’s an exploratory process!

cheers and thanks again.

i’ll let you know how my results come out and any tweaks I make.

Cheers and thank you.

In this case, since we’re dealing with simple numbers, we use input1D. But it may not allow you to make the exact connections you want! So here’s where MEL helps.

Let’s say your clamp node is called clamp1, and your average node is called avg1. Use the following MEL command to make the right connection:

connectAttr -force clamp1.outputR avg1.input1D[1]

The “-force” option forces the connection.
Since your SamplerInfo’s facing ratio is connected to input1D[0], now both your nodes will be connected to the right inputs, and the averaging will work fine.

As for your Ramp, check if it’s a U or V ramp, and connect the output of the average to the appropriate co-ordinate. I have a U ramp, and the “output1D” of my average node is connected to “uCoord” of my ramp.

Try these changes, and it should work!

Thanks again for the kind words.

I am having a bit of a hard time with the technical stuff though, since I am unfamiliar with these utilities. If it is not too much trouble, I was wondering if you could help?

I got something similar to what to what you have, but it seems a bit off. I wonder if I connected things wrong or perhaps I just need to adjust my ramp.

I made a phong and put a bump on it, which was simple enough. Then I connected the phong’s outColor to the clamp’s input and set the min to 0 and max to 1.

Then I figured I had to connect the clamp’s output to the Average utility, and it would only allow me to connect it to the input3D[0], so I did. I then also have the SamplerInfo’s facing ratio connected to the Average’s input1D[0], which again is all it would allow me to do.

Then I connected the Average’s output1D to the ramp’s U and V Coordinates. Finally, the ramp’s outColor connects to the surfaceShader’s outColor.

Sorry for the mouthful I would much appreciate it if you could help.

Anyways, I am really interested in non-photorealistic rendering and animation, so when I saw your Moom animations I was quite excited. Just wanted to say thanks for putting your stuff out there. Keep up the awesome work