GP - Watercolour Shading

The director of our animation had this vision of a watercolour style animation akin to the Twinings Tea "get back to yourself" advert. Which we all jumped on board with and the task of sorting this out was myself and another girl, Jen.





We did numerous tests together mainly on cubes, we tried adding a pencil drawn outline, blurring the edges, adding a bump map texture and adding a watercolour texture to the shader. Some had effects we kind of liked but none of them were completely right.











So in the end we both decided that we would work with a flat washed out shader as a background and then we would add lines over the top and in Nuke she would add various watercolour textures to different layers. Below is my first attempt at the kind of shader we wanted, this kind of pastel effect. However this was scrapped as we quickly realised this was based on the ambient and incandescence and wasn't affected by lighting and wouldn't work in our scenes.

So then I moved on to a simple ramp shader so that we could still get the whited out edges that gives watercolour images a particular look. Below is what Jen did in Nuke, we loved it however we quickly realised that the colours would impede too much on our animation and we had to find a way to do this without getting the colour leaking though.

 So after a lot of messing around we got to something that looked like this. The very basic colours, which would be lightened more, with toon lines, some animation to check it and the faint watercolour wash textures over the top.

Eventually we got it looking really nice with some edge degradation and at one point we were toying with the idea of lined paper background underneath.

 However unfortunately after all this time and effort the look was scrapped within about a week of our deadline, so we ended up with just my shader which looked a little lack lustre on its own, but I simply had no time to fix it which was a shame.

Rachel