Art direction
Based on previous research, I decided to use a more cartoonish and hand-painted style for the project. I want to keep the roughness of the canvas at a low level but visible, and include outlines.
I would not use too much irregular watercolor gradient effects, especially on characters. I would use 3 types of shading: highlight, halftone and shadows, but I will blur the boundaries between them. It will be more like alcohol-based marker than traditional watercolor.
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Hence I chose to use Fra、yed stylization and amended some attributes here.
https://artineering.io/styles/frayed/#style-attributes
WIthout frayed Frayed
Canvas
There are many canvas texture to choose. To prevent shower door effect, we can enable canvas advection with vfx control in sfx material settings. Since I used minimum canvas scale, shower door effects could be ignored without canvas advection.
low scale texture large scale texture
Shadows
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.
With the Watercolor and Frayed style, the AO term modulates the pigment density, resulting in darker colors in occluded areas. It just affect the contrast of the whole scene generally.
NPR material settings
For this cake I just enabled highlight and specularity to make it look better.
Painterly shading
Light color and shade color can be changed for different materials, so it is better to separate materials for different parts. I tend to choose purple as shade color for yellow objects, choosing black as shade color might look a little boring.
Outlines
Outlines can be created by using a larger mesh with reversed normals.(single sided)
It also can be created directly in Maya Software renderer by assigning outlines under toon menu. Attributes can be adjusted to achieve different results.
However, with MNPRX plugin, outlines can be created automatically and can be customised to certain areas and darkened or lightened using paint tools. It is better to paint vertices before skinning. Once the skinning is completed and then use paint tools, the vertex color node will be retained in the history, resulting in slower real-time rendering. Keying paint effects will also lead to slow rendering.