Morning Witch

The project consists mostly of aiStandard shaders with mid to high levels of emission, which tends to flatten the overall look. An aiToon shader is used for some contour edges.

This project was divided into five render layers:

Base – Clean base with no toony elements
Highlights – All the hand-painted toony details/specs.
Paper Dots – Dark and light dot noises to achieve a paper-like look.

Painted Edges – The stylized contour edges that were painted in Substance.
Toon Edges – The contour edges created with an aiToon shader. Some lines were made directly in Nuke.
Everything is adjusted and combined in Nuke.

This texture contains all the stylized elements, along with high contrast in the roughness and normal passes. Used for most of the render layers.

This is the texture version used for the base render layer. It doesn’t include any toony details, has no normal information, and its roughness is less contrasted.

These three masks control the opacity of the dots, edges, and highlights render layers. They are also exported to Nuke for extra tweaks in comp.

These are just some painterly layers created in Substance and that are part of the textures. They don’t affect any shader; they are simply exported to Nuke for extra control.

These masks create the large highlights in the scene. I'm using this method to preserve the stylized shapes that the original concept has and to be able to animate this detail in Nuke.

Tri-planar animated textures created in Maya. They control the displacement and normal of the material used in their render layer. These are the textures responsible for the subtle animation effect.