From the course: Maya: Shader Networks

Understanding a non-photoreal network

From the course: Maya: Shader Networks

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Understanding a non-photoreal network

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- Non-photo real rendering is any shading technique, which aims to produce a stylized effect rather than something that looks "realistic". And in this case, I've created a shader network to produce an effect similar to a woodcut engraving. Let's take a look at that. I'll give focus to the camera view by clicking on it, and then open up the Arnold Render View, Arnold, Render. In this scene, we have a single light, which is providing illumination and all the objects are receiving the same material. And it's got a non-photo real shader network. Let's take a look at this network and kind of deconstruct it. Here is the material. And it's a surface shader. It's a special type of shader, which does not react to light. You can use that for a matte painting or any kind of object in which you don't want the illumination in the scene to affect the material. But yet we are seeing some illumination here. And the reason we're seeing that is because I've got a note in the network, which is deriving the surface luminance or the illumination on those surfaces. And that is used in the shader network, to for example, vary the width of the lines of this woodcut cut effect. Let's investigate this shader network in a little bit more detail. The node that's feeding directly into the surface shader is a condition node, and it's an if then else condition node. The condition node performs a test. And if that test comes back true, then a certain color is output here. And if that test comes back false, we get a different color. And that's how I've separated the paper from the ink here. We've got a kind of subtle paper effect here in the white areas. Up here I've got the section of the shader network that generates the paper effect, and that's simply a noise that's being projected onto all of the surfaces from the camera point of view, as we saw in the previous movie. Then down here, we have the ink section, and it's a layered texture with three inputs. There's a noise effect, there's a ramp, and then there's a remap value, which is taking the input from this surface luminance. So we're finding the brightness of these surfaces depending upon the lighting in the scene, and then layering that with a ramp to provide these lines and a noise to break up the lines and make them look natural or handmade. That's how this particular non-photo real shader works. And in the following movies, we'll construct it from its component parts.

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