Outlines

One of my favorite parts of the look of my thesis project is the outlines on all of the game objects. The idea of applying outlines to my models was one of several ideas proposed to me by Jason Patnode, one of my midpoint panel members and one of the people I worked with in my conditional period. I did it by simply applying the toon line function in Maya. However, because many people of my game sets and characters are made of several cubes meshed together, the toon line script would build outlines around every single cube as opposed to the group. Furthermore, the outlines would appear only on the edge of the object relative to the camera, and I wanted the lines to be persistent on the actual edges of the mesh. My solution was to convert the toon lines to a mesh, which drew all of the outlines on the mesh, then delete each individual line that I didn't need. The process of adding lines to everything became a major step in the building process, and would often take as much time to build as the objects themselves, but I think the results justify the labor! I really like how the lines cause everything to pop on the screen!