It's simple, but a lot of work went into the simplicity
I started by creating some main "vinyl" materials which covered nearly all of the show's assets
But some materials were special. As seen in the Makhan Chor episode, we had to make butter that looked both toylike and delicious!
We tested out different approaches for snow, from realistic to flat.
We settled on the glitter plastic version
with just enough translucency to look snow-like
Burfi material for the Lakshmi episode
The guide was 114 pages long. It started with reference...
and then delved into each material example...
and how to recreate it.
This was our menu
some materials were removed in the end...
Special materials like Iridescent were used sparingly
but I did my research...
and came up with something that looked real
We rarely used it, but I loved the enamel material
An example of one of the many description pages
I included multiple colors
front lighting example
back lighting example
ray separation
node graph
The sparkles were fun
especially in rainbow
Check out the snow shader in Vahana
and the butter shader in Makhan Chor
Overall it came together
and feels very diverse
Painted by Joey Chou!
This was a joke, Joey painted this for my birthday, this was how we were doing material call-outs on Ghee Happy at the design stage.
What can I say about the Ghee Happy materials? So much of what makes the look iconic is what the world is made of. I worked with Joey Chou to come up with some pleasing 3D materials that walk the line between photoreal and stylized. We wanted something that gave viewers the feeling of playing with vinyl toys, but a bit more stylized. The amount of imperfection in the surface quality was highly curated.
Because we were working with our partner Superprod, and had limited budget, we had to find ways to be decisive. One of the best successes for the project was the 114 page "Material Guide" that I created. After crafting the materials that will be featured in the show, I created the guide to act as a sort of menu that we can refer to when creating new CG assets.
