One of the issues I had at the start of this project I had a few issues as there was no specific style to work on, all I had was 'we want it to look mongolian' and what was in the directors head. Also not really having a concept artist on board at first, I was struggling at first as it is not normally the job of the renders to find the style of the film but to mimic what the concept looks like. We had plenty of artists in our group just who weren't fitted to what the director wanted.
After sitting down with the group and having a discussion with the director we managed to decided on a cell shaded style mixed with a scroll look. Unfortunately at this point I still didn't have any concepts to work from, so the first thing I did was to go to CreativeCrash.com and raid their huge bank of user created content to find a cell shader. I eventually managed to find a cell shader that allowed me to start experimenting.
I spent a week or two playing with the settings to try and see what kind of style I could find. Once I had a basic idea of the controls for the shader i started creating a series of basic images just o show the director what it could possible look like. for these render is decided to focus on the face of a character rig i had a it showed variation in shadow because of all the curves on its face.
For the shader there were 3 main settings to be played with first of it was possible to changes the size each section (Shadow, Normal and Highlight), the amount of sections and finally give a hue to any section for coloured light.
Below are a selection these renders which were the starting point that i showed to the director
Here you can see a mock up I did for the environment to test the renders with some simple mountains just to get a feel for how it could look as a whole.
After showing this render to the director it was decided this wasn't really the direction the film should have been going in so I was going to have to bring experiment with some different styles.
