StyleShade

Art-Directable Stylized Shading for Maya

StyleShade is a Maya plugin that gives artists direct, art-directable control over stylized shadow/highlight placement through an intuitive rigging workflow.

Based on the SIGGRAPH paper:

“Shading Rig: Dynamic Art-directable Stylised Shading for 3D Characters,” Lohit Petikam, Ken Anjyou, and Taehyun Rhee, 2021

Languages: Python, OpenGL

GitHub Repo

Demo Presentation (turn volume up)

The Problem

Traditional toon shaders place shadows based purely on lighting calculations.
Artists often need specific, story-driven shadow shapes that cannot be achieved through lighting alone.
Manual paint-overs and frame-by-frame corrections are slow and break as lighting or animation changes.

The Solution

Gives artists direct, art-directable control over shadow placement using intuitive controllers.
Custom shadow shapes follow character deformation and update automatically as lighting changes.
Supports keyframed shadow poses at different light angles, allowing shadows to transition automatically without manual animation.

Target Users

Technical artists, character artists, and animators creating stylized or cel-shaded characters.
Production pipelines that require consistent, reusable, art-directed shading.

User Workflow:

Select a mesh and click Assign StyleShade Shader. The mesh gets the StyleShade toon material, establishing a cel-shaded base.

Select the mesh that you want to apply shadow shapes to, and click Create Shadow Locators to place a locator in the viewport (organized in Groups by mesh). Adjust its position and parameters (anisotropy, sharpness, bend, bulge, rotation, radius) in the Channel Box to shape the shadow to your liking. Repeat if necessary.

To have the custom shadow shapes also react to light direction in an art-directed way, the user must set up presets by keying the shadow shape states. Set the light to a starting angle, press Keyframe at Light Angle, rotate the light to a new angle, and press it again. Locators will interpolate their positions and parameters between the two keyframes automatically when the light direction changes, without having to manually transition them.

To have the custom locators follow the mesh when the mesh moves, enable Track Deformation so locators follow the mesh as it deforms, keeping shadows attached to the same part of the character throughout animation.

Images & Screenshots