Toon Macros for Gumshoe & Brok
Part 1 : Development

Gumshoe and Brok is a 3D toonshaded collaborative project, rendered in Renderman, utilizing a cell shaded look developed by Ryan Heniser. The effect is archived by combining multiple edge detections extracted from the normals and ids of an image sequence, and then layering the edges over the Ci (apparent color) of the same image sequence.

It became apparent after the first composite, that a simplified shake script was going to be needed, especially if we are going to finish on time. I took Ryan's original shake script and refined it, adding the ability to have more finite control over the line width, smoothness, and intensity, as well as cleaning up some premultiplication issues. I then added the ability to incorporate shadow passes.

There were over 45 nodes involved in a two element composite which is a bit daunting to navigate around. My macros drop the visible node count down to 11 per two element composite.

Above are the icons created for the toon macros.

Node management before macros .

UI for macros.

Node management after macros.

macro refinements

After meeting with Director I was asked to make some modifications that would increase

productivity in the pipeline as well as refine his visual aesthetic.

Above you can see the additions to the original macros. I added a 2D drop shadow

with a Move2D and Corner Pin to simulate the character's shadow. This approach was

decided upon due to render times and deadlines.

The displacement node was used to warp the shadows as the character goes down the stairs.

As of now, this has not been added to the latest macro.

The BG macro had a blur node added and a max layer to soften the shadow line from

the bg_shadow input as it mixed with the bg_color_shadow.

This is the macro and the same shot but with the changes added to the foreground toon node.

This image is with the new macro but before any of the shadow transformations have been added.

This is the refined UI closed, followed by the expanded version.

A new issue has come about. There is an artifact on the character. One of the egdedetects

is sampling from one frame back on the id element, but only on certain frames.

Below is a shot of frame 310. Notice the nice stripe through character.

(Note: the lines through the image are the control handles for the pan and corner pin.)

I had a similar type issue with the toon_BG macro. It was corrected by opening a

pervious version and reconstructing the changes, but with a slightly new naming

convention. It is my thought that the errors are coming from my code, but I'm not

certain where just yet. I hope to have this resolved in the next few days.