In this blog, we will attempt to create a stylized texture for the Apollo character. This effect will be achieved in two parts. The first part involves repainting the character’s texture, and the second part utilizes MAYA’s MASH editor to add realistic brush strokes. This technique has appeared in numerous stylized animations, giving the scene and character models a unique painted feel, unlike ordinary rendering.
Returning to the first part, for the texture test, I need to ensure the texture’s quality can display the underlying color under lighting (a painting technique where adjacent or complementary colors are blended into the object’s true color). The main method is to connect a color channel map to the normal map of the shader. This map allows us to reflect the corresponding colors under light by adjusting the shader’s transmittance of the color channel map. This effect doesn’t require repainting the texture and can add more colorful and stylized touches to the model.
However, we can notice that the shader’s color blending isn’t quite realistic, resembling a brush-painted layer of unrelated color on the character. I haven’t found a solution for this yet, which is an aspect I need to acknowledge. Perhaps manually blurring the color tendency map might achieve the desired result.