 |
What you should know about the toon shader. AM has a powerful toon shader, but there are a few things you should be aware of and plan for. 1. Hooks. Hooks can cause nasty spotted lines along your model. I said to use them in the modeling section, but if you can avoid using them do so. 2. When 1 object passes through another you have no control of which objects toon line will be used. The grounds red line has overridden the green. If the ground had no toon-lines then neither would the bottom of the sphere. 3. Many times toon line colors will appear on the right edge and bottom of the screen. Not much you can do except to crop it out later. |
 |
Ok, now lets take a look at our model. The model is using standard shading placed in the default choreography and lighting. |
 | Select the model, under Surface attributes find the toon shading section. Switch it from Standard to Toon. |
 |
In your Final Render Options turn on Toon Render but leave the options alone. (At least until you start doing passes, next section) Ok now lets try rendering this out... |
 | Horrible! The problem is the default Choreography lighting. |
 |
Delete all the lights from the Choreography - Main, Fill, Rim. Create a new light. Call it an Anime Light. Change the bulb type to Klieg. Then go under Options > Cast Shadows > and change Type from Raytraced to Z-Buffered. This will improve rendertimes and in my opinion give better results. Change the Softness to 5%. Depending on the type of look you're aiming for you might want to change the Darkness setting. For bright happy-happy toons lower the darkness %. If you're going gothic and film-noir then increase to 100%. Crank up the Map Resolution as high as it'll go. |
  |
Drop the light into your choreography and aim it at your character.
Now lets render this sucker. |
 |
Not too bad, but could be better. Here are some skin tone setting I like to use. Diffuse Color set to R 255, G 225, B 215. Ambient Color set to Red. Ambience Intensity set to 30%. Toon Line thickness at 0.5 And take a look at the Toon Gradient. If you don't know how the gradient works it goes something like this: The right side of the gradient controls the look of your shader when light hits it straight-on. The farther left you go on the gradient means you are farther and farther from the light. The right tick in this gradient is set to 100%. Then there's a slight gradient down to a 60% tick. This will give you a result like- |
 |
This. Normally the darker shaded area would have a more grey-ish tone like it was in the previous render, but because the ambiance color was set to Red it's more pinkish. |
 |
However one toon-shader isn't always the best job for the entire character. You need to play with the gradients and colors to match the materials you want your character to wear. I created a new group for the bodysuit, here are its settings. The toon Gradient has a much longer color shift between 100% and 60%, the toon type is also set to 'Toon with Falloff' I also put in a slight specular setting. |
 | And you get this, a nice form-fitting spandex suit. |
 | Instead of color percentages you can also have the gradient use exact colors. |
 |
White is usually darkened with a light blue instead of grey in anime and manga. The effect is easily replicated like this. Be careful tho, the blue areas will overwrite any color decals you have. This is why I prefer to use Ambiance Color to change the shaded colors. |
 |
Here is the completed model! Pretty much the same as a couple renders ago except I changed the hair shader and the color shifts. The color shifts are very easy to do. (and look great) They're created using a gradient material, Add turbulence (Perlin, Sine, CellTurb, whatever) and crank up the intensity a few hundred %. That's it. In addition I put some soft "makeup" decals on the cheeks and upper eyelids. The model is rigged and available here if you'd like to tear it apart. If you use it in your project please give credit where credit is due. Thanks. |
 |
One last thing. Setup your shaders for how you plan to render/view them. For this character I have 2 versions of her. The one on the left has a complicated toon-gradient (8-10 ticks or so for the light blue areas) which looks great on closeups or still-shots. But when the character is animated moving quickly and bouncing around the screen I use a 2nd version with a much more simplified shader which makes the movement easier to read. Just something to keep in mind :) Have fun! |