Militarized Police Cover Art

I've used my Militarized Police model to make some cover art for a friend's new song of the same name.

This was a further experiment in NPR/toon styles. I've stuck to the original goal of using a fairly simple model (no textures or sculpting), but with heavy stylization from both materials and compositor effects. Here's a quick rundown:

- Cycles toon shaders, with procedural Musgrave size and smooth noise to disrupt the shadow terminators. It is most visible on the helmet, but exists across the whole model. It is based on the UVs, which had to be equalized to keep it consistent.

- Boosted shadows in the compositor using the Diffuse Direct. Since this involves mesh lights, the Shadow Pass is not accurate. Color Ramping or Curving the Diffuse Direct can let you make a new Shadow Pass.

- The new Sun Beams node for slight glow on the helmet lights.

- Three freestyle line sets (Silhouette/Border, Crease, and a Thick Silhouette/Border, using very slight geometry modifiers (backbone stretcher, polygonization, and perlin noise.) A mask based on the shadows taken from the Diffuse Direct is used to factor between the thin and thick lines, letting the lines be much thicker in dark areas. They could use work in a few areas, but that can happen in the next piece.

- Volumetric smoke simulation for the background. I kept it fairly basic to avoid distracting from the character.

- The clothing was made in Marvelous Designer, around a body from MakeHuman.

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