Watercolor-Shader 0.8
Copyright Mathias Gordon
www.obstundbewegung.de

waterColorShader.ma is for Maya4
waterColorShader3.1.mb is for Maya3.1



This Shader produces a kind of chinese ink style outline, and a color which doesn't match
pefectly the outline, but is a bit bigger and partly transparent at the edges.
if it does look like a watercolor-painting is up to you to decide, but there is beauty in it, no doubt. 
It is highly tweakable with about 30 attributes gathered in one node, because the shading network is somehow 
a bit complex.

comments:

1. the result is much clearer when you switch off double-sided in the rendering-attributes of the object
2. I recommend rendering all characters in a single renderLayer and composit them together.


downsides: 
1. the result doesn't have a premultiplied alpha-channel, so you do not see the transparency in the RenderWindow.
This is a kind of contra-intuitive, but the only thing you need to is, multypling in your favourit composit-package and it's done.
Any help with this issue is highly appreciated.

2.
it doesn't produce predictable results for either very flat surfaces because it works by evaluating the relation between the camera-direction and the surface-normal.





So these are the attributes


LineColor		->	Color of the Line
BaseColor		->	Color of the Colored Area
Highlightcolor		-> guess !
ShadowColor	...
HighlightSize		-> the Size of the Highlight			##	it doesn't really make sense to have the sum of Highlight Size and Shadowsize to set to bigger than 1	
ShadowSize		-> the Shadow Size				## 	if you don't see any highlights or shadows your scene might be too dark or too bright
ColorIregularity	-> makes the shape of shadow and highlight somehow irregular
Line Thickness		-> the Thickness of the Outline
Curvyness		-> the Curvyness of the Outline
Line Distance		-> The Distance of The Outline from the actual edge of the shape
Base Transparency	-> The final Transparency of the Colored area
Color Outline Curvyness -> The Curvyness of the shape of the colored area
Line Transparency	-> The final Transparency of the Outline ( I guesss you don't want them transparent)
Smooth Out Color Strength-> makes the soft Area Brighter 		## take care if you also use OuterTransparency because in the final result this attributes multiply in the case you have white background
Outer Transparency	-> makes the soft Area transparent 		## see above
Base Lightness		-> too brighten up the colored Area
Line Lightness		-> too brighten up the Line-Color
TransparencyDistance	-> the Distance from the outline to the region where the soft area begins
LightnessColor		-> the Color which will be used to brighten the result, this is typical the color of your paper and white by default, is also used by 'Smooth Out Color Strength'


When you have some shader experience feel free to change the shader-graph as well. Expecially the 3 Texture Nodes, which are
responsible for the shape of the irregularity are highly likely to be changed to get different results, without compromising the functionality of the shader.

Please send me any changes you do and comments to info@obstundbewegung.de

you find other interesting stuff on www.obstundbewegung.de
