Arnold Toon Shader Series | Part 1 | Breaking down the Toon Shader

hey guys for today's tutorial I'll be breaking down the arnold toon shader for the cinema 4d plugin i'll be going through most of the attributes for it and like how to use them in different ways to create different effects for your shader and in the end we will be able to come up with like similar images to like styles like these and i'll also show you how to camera project your textures so you can come up with sort of like this sort of retro like halftone effect and you can see how there's the sort of the diagonal like shading stuff and also like more like sketchy feel images like this where we'll have a couple variations of the texture that will overlay using masks for like cutting out what we want them to be in our shadow areas I'll also show you a little quick tip on how to create pixel art with your little shader using the negative values in your anti-aliasing okay so to be able to use the Arnold toon shader there's a couple things we have to setup first so first go into your render settings located in sort of the top middle here change your renderer to the Arnold render and then select it's sort of drop-down tab to get our edge detection lines to work we have to change your default filter type to contour filter and we can leave the default filter width as default right now the lower it is the thinner the line but as you increase the width of it here it'll also increase your render time so be aware of that and then also in environment or sorry in Ray depth let's drag our total rays down to zero so we don't get any global illumination bounces and that might all depending on the style you want you might not want to have that and you can see now as soon as we turned on the contour filter we're starting to get the outline effect on our objects also to get it to work if you're not using a self lit material you can use like any light with the tune shaders right now I'm just using a distant light just for sort of a globally lit scene so yeah right now I have a toon shader assigned but to create one you can go into the Arnold materials and go into surface and create a toon shader and ice have mine applied to my scene objects right now so it's what you can do is double click that and go into open network editor and this will bring up our sort of graphing area where we can start to build up our shaders using the default cinema 4d area is a little bit difficult to use because there it's just yeah it's just a little bit difficulties okay so to start our toon shader first let's go into our base attribute this sort of works like a basic Lambert material as you can see here how it just sort of it goes from like a black to like a medium gray and has like just a full sort of range will fall off and there's no service pack or anything like that so you can think of it as just like a full Lambert material right now our first attribute the weight is set to 0.8 let's just drag that up to one for now so it's fully affecting our scene and we're getting true colors that we want to understand and then the second attribute color we can click this little arrow to drop it down and then quickly adjust the colors and our scene to where we want them to be our next attribute is our tone mapping and this is where we can start to get our sort of cel-shaded look into our scene by Clint being the gray values into a sort of a stepped feel to it to create that dissociated look so let's start by doing that what we can do now is grab a ramp shader so you can go up into the search field here and start to type in ramp and we can drag and drop the wrap RGB node into our graph editor so to connect these two together you can drag the output sort of circle here you can see how you get sort of a connection line and release it on the sort of blue square in the upper left corner and we'll get a drop-down menu of every sort of connection spot where you can connect it into so for now let's drag it into our base and our tone map by default it'll be completely black because when you select our ramp node and you go into type right now it's set to custom the tone mapping is UV based so we have to sort of assign it to a something that looks at the UVs you can see how when we change it to other ones it will always stay the same but if you adjust the UV mapping on your actual object if we scale it like twice um sometimes you'll start to create like weird sort of like artifacting or whatever in your scene so if you're using a tone mapping or we can tile our textures in different way so keep this sort of default so you're not messing up how the ramp is looking at your UVs to project the color information so to create our step look what we can do is let's grab our black node and let's change it to step and right now it goes to full black because our gradient range is basically full black so and we start to drag down our white node will start to bring back that white information and you can see now we're getting nice crisp edges along our sort of our fall-off range and - and you can like once you move that like further away you can see how we're pulling the more blacks into our scene so now what we can do is you can see how you can sort of click and add new points to your rap node what we can do now is start to drag that up into a grave value and now we're starting to get our step being effect and to create our little cel-shaded look so now you can play with these and sort of adjust them to create sort of the look and feel you want okay so how though tone mapping works is it's getting multiplied on top of our color Channel in our base attribute so now that we have our ramp connected what we can do is turn our color back to white so we're multiplying it on top of a full white color and our color channel isn't going to affect the colors we can use in our rap node so we can do now is grab our first little graph our first little gradient note here then we can choose its own color for that and you can see now we're getting the color only in the area that this is affecting and we're not getting that white multiplied on top of all our other nodes on the long graph so we can grab our gray sort of node now then we can choose a completely different color for that and they won't affect each other and then we can choose our black one and you can start to create some cool looks with this now now that we have full control over where we want our colors to be and you can see now we can really dial it and dial it in to sort of create like a nice little spiky feel to it and if you want you can add in more sort of points through this and really start to dial in how you want your objects to look and feel so next let's go into our emission tab and this is where I actually like do you do most of my material sort of creation with the toon shader as I feel it has more customizability than the base channel so we can do now let's drag your base to zero and let's drag our weight up to one for our emission tab and right now our screen is just getting filled completely with the emission color so now we can sort of choose like a color for that and you can see now we're not getting any lighting information and our scene but we're still getting our sort of like contour edge detection effect going on so for this what we can do now let's start to bring in our base sort of color back in a little bit and you can see it's how they are sort of like blending with each other and I like to do use this way to sort of tone down the shadows and stuff you can see in this image how the shadows aren't like a harsh like black or like a super dark that's because I blended the emission and the base color together with the same color in both so I can sort of get the shadows to the colors I wanted to okay so next I'm going to break down the edge and the silhouette channels for the toon shader and these are like all your edge detection and sort of like color attributes and all your custom ability for the edges and your scene so to start if you want it to work make sure you're using edges is turned on and you can see when it's rendering it doesn't really apply your edges until you're like second last or last refinement and your IPR window our first channel is or your like color channel where you can like color pick your edges let's drag in a little window here so we can render our little scene faster there you go now you can see we're like getting color information for our edges the second one is the tone map and that works exactly the same as our base color tone map so we can do now is let's plug our ramp tone map node that we created into our edged tone map and you can see now we're getting that tone mapping effect on our edges as well let's go into our edge color and let's turn that back to white so we get the true colors for our rap node and there now you can see we're getting that sort of tuned cel-shaded look on our edges as well so the next portion is the opacity that's pretty self-explanatory it's just like making your edges fade out a bit until you like don't want to be visible anymore and you can plug in RAM nodes and stuff into there so they can like fade out around certain angles of your scene but for now let's leave that just as full though with the width scale is the width of your edges and your scene so you can see how once I start to bring that down our edges are getting thinner and thinner and now they're like barely showing up at all cuz they're still thin so next let's go into our edge detection drop-down and this is the most powerful part of the arnold toon shader in my opinion because it has so much customizability of how you want your edges to be like on your scene like around the silhouette or like the contour lines and everything like that and has so much customized ability with it because you can actually import masks to mask out where you want your edges to be so to do that I have some masks hair created from the Jas placement sort of application and it sort of can create these like real really looking materials and stuff and eyes I actually created like 20 or 30 of these there's a whole bunch of different sort of variations of scale and sizes and stuff but for now let's drag this one into our scene you can drag and drop it in and it'll create a little file node and let's plug our output of that into our edge edge detection and our mask color and it might be laggy for a little second cuz it's converting the image into a text file just because that's how Arnold uses textures that converts them into a text file which are faster to read at render time and so right now this is obviously based on UV so we can do now let's go into our UV mapping and let's actually change that to cubic so it's just a quick little UV setup so we get some little bit more of it even mapping I've actually didn't change so sometimes you'll have to like refresh your scene and it should refresh how your textures are mapped there we go it's now we're getting you can see now the edge detection is actually looking at the edges in your image that you plug in so the differences between the values it'll actually find those and then put an edge there so you can see now we're getting all these edges around the different values in our texture so what we can do now is we can refine that to get more of the look we want so what we can do now let's go into the multiply channel of our texture node and let's start to drop that down to like a gray and you can see now less and less of the contour lines are starting to show up because we're clamping the colors down so much that it can't separate like the colors to the colors from each other so won't put a line in some areas so you can sort of isolate just the edges you want in that sort of way let's actually remove our tone mapping from her edges for now so we can clearly see what we're how our edges are looking let's turn our edges to like a nice blue here a nice deep blue there we go let's actually go into our texture let's turn this back up a little bit there now you can see we're getting some of the edge detection in the one thing with the edges and your scene is it's very dependent on how big your scene actually is resolution wise so right now if you go into your output we're actually only 720p so we can do is lock our ratio and let's bring that up to bring that up to 1080p and you'll see now once it refines it creates clips per a crisper and actually smaller line so if you're working in a smaller resolution just like working in it be aware of that if you increase your the size of your image when you go to render you might have to adjust your the width of your contours so now our width is at one and you can't increase it past one like it has like a hard max on that so too if you want it thicker than that but the resolution of your scene what we'll do is we'll go into our render settings go into the Arnold under options and this is where we'll increase the width of all the contour lines and our scene as like a global change but yeah just be aware that this will increase the render times so you can see now we're getting thicker lines in nursing and you'll see al is taking a little bit longer to fully render those out for now let's just put that back to the default too so the next thing is the advanced edge control this is a little bit more complex and I won't go into that so the next one is this silhouette channel so let's enable that and by default nothing should change except for you'll see how the color of our silhouette will be different from our edge detection color so let's turn this into like a bright green and I'll show you what I mean so now you can see how through the silhouette we're getting that black color and our interior edges we're getting the our edge channel color so I just actually turn those both to like a blue we can color pick that color just so make sure the same okay let's leave this one as like a darker color for now let me just string this up a bit so I'm gonna show you the next step so right now our interior lines and our silhouette lines are the same width but now with our silhouette enabled once we drop the width scale of our edges you'll see now our edges get thinner but our silhouette stays the same thickness but when we turn down our silhouette width scale they all scale down globally so they sort of work in tandem with each other this one is sort of like your new global scale for it and this will be with scaling down your into your edges I don't think there's a way to scale your silhouette smaller than your edges so just be aware of that well for now let's increase the edges so they're just a little bit smaller something like that let's bring this up a bit okay and then yeah it also has a tone mapping attribute as well where you can customize that okay so next let's go into our specular channel and this works the same way as I call your basic blends or your Fong's or any sort of like IPR material so let's increase the weight to that and right now you'll see how there's sort of like nothing in our scene what we have to do is increase our roughness and you'll see how we're starting to bring that specular highlight back into your object next is the Annis droppy and that's just like normal and a stroppy for like your metallic materials to sort of change how this back wraps around your scene but just be aware how it's sort of UV based so you can see with our cubic projection as sort of messing up how that looks so you'll have to change that back to our back to your like specific UVs or adjust your you v's for that object but for now let's just keep that off at zero but you can also use like the rotation rotate it around as well but yeah for now let's drop that back down to zero in this specular as well you have your tone map option as well so let's plug our little tone map thing that we created into our specular tone map now and you can see now we're starting to get that cel-shaded look but just in our specular channel so what we can do now you can see now once I increase our roughness as sort of spreads out the art tone mapping look so you could sort of like play with those with each other or you can like manually adjust them like if see this is sort of like the end point and I'll never increase past what your roughness is at so they sort of like have their restrictions of playing off each other in that way but for now let's keep them like that the and that's basically like all the options for the specular you can like customize it by bringing in my mixing ramps together to create a little bit more of a look you want but for now let's remove the tone mapping for that so we're back to our defaults back now let's go into our stylized highlight and this is sort of a real cheap way of doing tone mapping for that but it needs a light that to plug into it so let's grab our light in our scene and drag it into there and you can see now we're getting the hard edge sort of cel-shaded spec and you can play with the size of that there as well as if you go back up into our no more specular channel you should be able to play with the roughness sometimes actually not as low doesn't look like it's working here so yeah if you use the stylus highlight it basically tells a specular highlight not to work unless you like bring down the yeah if you bring down the weight to that that's the only thing that works in conjunction with that so this is sort of like a quick way of doing just like a little like cel-shaded highlight on your scene but for now let's whoops let's sort of move that and bring our size back down to zero so we're left with our default specular so the next channel is the rim lighting channel so to show you guys that let's drop our weight down to zero and our roughness is zero just to turn off our spec completely and let's turn in the color channel let's bring it up to a nice bright color and in the width let's start to increase the width and you can see now there's sort of adding in our rim lighting based on a for now effect and you can see like the more you bring in your width like the more a wraps around your object based on like the opposite of your camera and also we can sort of mask out where we want our rim lighting effect to be by using a light in the rim light option so let's drag and drop our light from our scene into there and you can see now how was sort of masking out where the lighting sort of like hits your object the rim lighting so next Isis or remove our rim lighting and let's clear our light that we dropped in there and then the next thing I'll show you guys is Sheen and it's sort of similar to our rim lighting effect you can see how it's like bringing and that for now effect but it's getting masked out by your main light it just doesn't have that sort of heart of effect but you can see sort of how it's playing on your objects kind of like somewhat of like a metallic material or like a soft like velvety material or something and there's not much to this channel it's basically that's basically it you can customize it similar to how you like bring in nodes to your like color channel your roughness and stuff but that's about it for this one I never really had a use for this one yet so for now let's bring all that to zero so we're left with our default scene again so the last one I'll be showing you guys for our breakdown here is the geometry tab and this is basically where you'll plug in your normal mapping and your bump maps and stuff to effect your objects material so for now let's grab a bump note in a search in the search field start to type in bump and let's drag in bump 2d and that's plug in our sort of Griebel texture to there go into bump map and then let's drag this into our little blue drop down here and go to geometry and drop it into normal and by default not much will show up until you start to increase the bump height that's because we lowered the multiply here so if you want you can copy/paste this using control-c control-v it'll go through the converting it to text again and now we're able to use it so let's drag this into there actually and let's increase our multiply back up to white so it's not affecting the texture at all and you can see now we're getting a much stronger texture into our scene again and this just works like your normal bump mapping and stuff but what we can do now is tell our edge detection to look at the edges that the bump map creates and apply our edge detection along those so for now let's go and remove our mask color from there by just clicking and dragging away so now we're only left with our silhouette lines but what we can do now let's go back up into our edge drop-down and our edge detection drop down and right here we have our angle threshold this is looking at your scene through your camera and anything passed like 150 degrees it'll create an edge on that so once we start to lower this back down to 72 degrees or so you'll see now all these all the angles past 72 degrees it'll start assigning lines to that and once you start to bring it down more and more it'll start to really fill up all your bump mapping with those contour edges and you can see here now we're getting all our bump mapping being a edge detected and this will be less like a whole bunch of like going back and forth looks like how much bump you want to show through this little sort of affect how much lines are drawn as well and be playing with like your angle threshold one thing if you change your edge detection sort of like algorithm it'll change what the edge detection sees a little bit like you can see now we're not getting anything because of the smooth normals yeah so we're not getting like anything at all now so if we go to our geometric normal actually we still won't get anything so I don't really usually change this at all I've never really had to so I just keep it on the shading normal which is default and you can see now we're at getting all our edges back

Channel: calder moore

Views: 79,297

Keywords: arnold, c4d, cinema 4d, toon, shader, c4dtoa, anime, stylized, tutorial

Id: 7JaCtU1fjDI

Length: 33min 19sec (1999 seconds)

Published: Fri May 10 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/bobrformalin]

Dude, that's awesome, I don't know why you got so few upvotes.