Warp header

Warp shader style

Previously Frayed shader style

Table of contents
  1. Style breakdown
  2. Tutorials
  3. Attribute breakdown
    1. Ambient Occlusion
      1. AO Blend Mode
      2. AO Radius
      3. AO Strength
    2. Atmospheric Effects
      1. Atmosphere Tint
      2. Atmosphere Range
    3. Warp
      1. Enable
      2. Inflation
      3. Frequency
      4. Amplitude
      5. Feathering
      6. Pigment Density
      7. Paper Granulation
    4. Edge Darkening
      1. Edge Darkening Intensity
      2. Edge Darkening Width
      3. Drybrush Threshold
      4. Drybrush color
    5. Max Gaps Overlaps Width
  4. Post Processing
  5. Warp Settings
    1. Toggle instance on selected
    2. Bake effect positions on selected
  6. Considerations
    1. Attach warped distortions onto objects
    2. Nurbs surfaces
    3. Inflation
    4. Warnings

Back to Warp Features

Style breakdown

The warp shader style, similar to the fray shader style, emulates the broken edges commonly found in paintings, in 3D. It also provides other painterly effects often found using traditional painting media such as pigment turbulence, edge darkening, canvas textures and more.

Broken warped distortion
Warped edge distortion close-up.
Broken frayed distortion
Frayed edge distortion close-up.

The broken edges from the warp shader style are generated by rendering a separate inflated 3D noise for each object. This noise is fractalized so that the broken edges retain the same pixel size, no matter how close/far the object is from the camera. Finally, the fractalized noise distorts the image to achieve the warped look. Individual meshes can be excluded entirely from the noise calculations by toggling the noise instances using the Flair Toolbox.

This shader style works on any Maya material, even with VertexFX art-direction on the warp amplitude and feathering. However using the Flair material unlocks painterly reflectance models and supports the entire art-direction framework of Flair. The material also contains a Animated setting attribute, which allows to attach the broken edges to animated objects. This can also be achieved on other materials using the Warp Settings.

While production-proven, the warp shader style may not have all features that you need. So please let us know if we can help polish the look exactly to your requirements and pipeline.


Tutorials

Warp 101 - Break 3D edges with Warped Edges
Warp 102 - Warped Edges In Nuke (Arnold-MNPRX)

Attribute breakdown

In this section, we only document global attributes specific to the warp shader style. To learn more about other global attributes, please see the globals node documentation.

Style attributes
Style attributes in the configuration node

Ambient Occlusion

Ambient Occlusion (AO) darkens the image in areas that are hard to reach for the ambient light due to the local shape of the geometry (e.g. concavities, crevices, holes). Note that this effect depends only on the geometry (and the viewpoint, to a lesser extent), and not on the lights present in the scene.

Flair currently uses a screen-space implementation of ambient occlusion based on the Ground-Truth Ambient Occlusion algorithm (GTAO).

AO Blend Mode

Defines how the computed ambient occlusion is applied on the final image.

  • None: AO is not applied.
  • Multiply: the AO is multiplied over the image.
  • Color Burn: same as above, except that the AO is blended over the image using the Color Burn blending mode.
  • Style-specific: AO is applied by the current style, so the effect depends on the style implementation. (default)
    • With styles other than the Graph styles, the AO modulates the pigment density, resulting in darker colors in occluded areas.

AO Radius

The radius used by the ambient occlusion filter: larger radius results in larger darkened areas.

AO Strength

The strength of ambient occlusion: higher values make the ambient occlusion darker.


Atmospheric Effects

Atmospheric effects are useful to add atmospheric depth to bigger scenes by changing the color within a specific range.

Atmosphere Tint

Defines a custom atmospheric perspective color, making things at distance tint towards the specified color.

Atmosphere Range

Defines the range at which the atmospheric tint will start and end. Set these values high to not have the atmosphere range affecting your scene.

If you wish to exclude an object from the atmosphere tint affect (e.g., a background plane), enable the Final Color attribute in the Flair shader material assigned to that object.

The range is set for Maya units multiplied by the World Scale, consider this when setting up this attribute.


Warp

Enable

Creates inflated noise instances of objects in the scene to be used for the warped stylization within Maya. You can disable this attribute if you don’t want warped distortions or do not wish to see the noise covering all scene elements in normal Viewport 2.0.

Inflation

Amount of inflation of the noise objects, default: 0.05. Inflation is required to keep the warped distortions outside of the geometry.

Inflation between 0 and 0.5

Frequency

Frequency of the warped distortions, default: 50.0.

  • Higher frequency ⇒ smaller distortions
  • Lower frequency ⇒ bigger distortions
Frequency between 0 and 200

Note: if the frequency is too high and the noise enters the sub-pixel size, it will flicker.

Amplitude

Determines the amount of warp distortions, default 1.0.

Varying amplitude between 0 and 10

Note: Increasing the Amplitude will also require a higher Inflation amount.

Feathering

Determines the softness of warped distortions, default 0.0.

Varying amplitude between 0 and 10

Pigment Density

The concentration of pigments, giving the render either a diluted or a more saturated and darker look.

Pigment Density between 0.5 and 2

Paper Granulation

The accumulation of pigments on the valleys of the paper (canvas). Concentrates the pigments on the valleys and creates a more saturated and darker look.

Paper Granulation between -1 and 5

Edge Darkening

Edge darkening accumulates the pigments (color) gradually towards the edges, generating darker edges.

Edge Darkening Intensity

Strength of the edge darkening effect. A higher intensity will concentrate more color on the edges.

Edge Darkening Intensity between 0 and 3

Edge Darkening Width

Width for the edge darkening effect.

Edge Darkening Width between 0 and 30

Note: A wider edge darkening will require an increase in intensity, as well.


Drybrush Threshold

Sharpness of the drybrush application. Using a dry brush will only apply pigments to the peaks of the canvas, leaving the canvas color appear at the valleys of its profile.

Drybrush Threshold between 0 and 20

Drybrush color

Color of the drybrush application.

Different drybrush colors.

Max Gaps Overlaps Width

Maximum width of the gaps & overlaps effect.

Gaps and overlaps width between 1 and 5

Post Processing

Post Processing attributes contain simple but useful self-explanatory post-processing filters

  • Saturation
  • Contrast
  • Brightness

This group is closed by default, but can be opened by clicking on it.



Warp Settings

The Warp settings allow additional functionality for the Warp shader style. The available settings can be found in the Flair toolbox, once you click on the Warp settings button.

The window with warp settings
The Warp settings window

Toggle instance on selected

This button will toggle the inflated instance on the selected objects on/off. Especially useful for transparent objects, so that only objects behind warp the end result.

Bake effect positions on selected

On Flair materials, this button is a convenience function that will check the Animated setting attribute on materials where the selected objects have been assigned into. With non-Flair materials, this is the only way to attach the warp distortions to animated objects.



Considerations

Attach warped distortions onto objects

Activate the Animated attribute within the materials to bake the warped distortion position onto animated objects.

Nurbs surfaces

Nurbs surfaces can’t save any data in vertex colors, so warped distortions won’t stick onto the objects and it won’t be possible to use VertexFX on them.

Inflation

  • Vertex normals in objects that are not sub-divided will need to be averaged for hard-edged objects. Otherwise, each face vertex has its own normal and inflation will leave gaps between each inflated face, creating incoherent warped distortions.
  • Thin objects should have faces on both sides for the object to inflate correctly.

Warnings

...due to multiply-instanced child Whenever you get this warning, uncheck the Enable attribute in the Warp globals to remove the instances, make the edits that you previously wanted to do and re-enable the instances.