Blender NPR Basics 1: Cartoon Shading

hey you'll make cool stuff like this this or this maybe it's an NPR sheet now if you want to make stuff like this to this or this right well let's get right down to it first of all say the default cube and set it straight to hell next we're gonna bring in Suzanne we're gonna shade her smooth and we're gonna give her say two levels of subdivision now we're gonna take our point light we're gonna move it say somewhere around here lower it a little bit maybe yeah that should be fine we'll take her camera bring it down so we have a better view of this and we'll switch to review port rendered well maybe well adjust the there we go right this trick only works levy why well because we're gonna be using a shader to our chibi no this is not supported by cycles as far as I know so let's bring out our timeline switch it to the shader editor and make a new material for suzanne here we're gonna take our base color bring it all the way up to white next we're going to find us our shader to RGB node we're gonna plug it in so what does this node actually do well that's right says like it says on the tin takes Herbie SDF output turns it into pure RGB that we can then manipulate everything you have this coming from the output of your BSD a few shadows here everything that's gonna get changed to RGB we can play around with that so let's add a color ramp and see Oh see now by default can play around a little bit cool very interesting it's bringing out the shadows reducing the gradients yeah now what we're looking for magic is in the interpolation mode we're gonna switch it to constant now that is a little bit or like it very nice so the cool thing with the color ramp is you can always change the colors here and you can add more stops to it so let's take our block and change it to something something like this and our white let's make it list out of color oh it's add like two more stops and we're gonna eyeball the transition a little bit between these two callers there we go very nice we can play around with this a little bit maybe shorten the shaded part bring out the mid-tones a little bit turn the highlights there we go that is your absolute basic cartoony shader with color banding all that sort of stuff the only other thing you theoretically need is free-style that is in your render properties we're not gonna mess around with it we can smash f12 immediately and get a result at least however we can make this more interesting all we need to do is add something some pizzazz something special to this now what I like about this kind of style usually in like drawings and illustrations and all that kind of stuff is stippling like the shading isn't done entirely by mixing cars it's sometimes done with a pencil and you get these cool lines that happen on the shaded areas like in the darkest of darkest shades so let's try and replicate that to do that we're first gonna bring in a wave texture now the wave texture plug it in to the output nothing special follows kind of the curvature it has these gradients we're gonna have to work on it so let's take the step by step first of all well let's fix the curvature problem we want this straight to do that we're going to bring in a texture coordinate node we're gonna plug in our window output to the vector input all the waves texture now that is a little bit better scale it up to something like oh call it 40 84 now now that looks a little more like stippling however I don't like the way it's angled I want it to be more to navab 45 degrees and I want to rotate it clockwise a little bit so I'm gonna bring in a mapping node plug it in I'm gonna rotate it around the z-axis that's the axis we're looking for this looks about right next let's get rid of this gradient here to do that we're gonna bring back our good friend the collar ramp we'll get back in and now if we take the black stop modify the thickness of those lines I think the white stop remove the gradient we want to find a sweet spot that might be a little too harsh too thick there we go they might say why not switch the interpolation mode to constant you don't want to do that because if you do you get these artifacts let's switch back to linear all right we got our stippling so how do we mix it with this color that we did previously all the way to do this is of course a mix node mix RGB plug this in plug in the color node and it still looks terrible all right what if we change the blend mode to say multiply so now what we're looking for hmm we got to do it's gonna use this factor input here to make sure that the stip thing only appears in the darkest of areas so the simplest way to do this yes have another caller ramp acting ask the factor now as an input we're gonna take the sheeter to RGB node and we're going to switch these stops around now why are we doing this if I if we plug this in directly to the output we can see that what we're doing here is we're putting white on the shadows of the shaded areas now this is because black represents the value of zero and white represents the value of one cell if we switch these around that means if you want something to appear on like a wall on an area we need this area to be white if we're using it as a factor so let's try this again let's plug this here plug this back in here right well play around with it a little bit this is not what we want let's switch these inputs around boom it works there we go we can little bit like this maybe excellent let's increase the scale or the texture a little bit and now we could play around with this oh we should switch this to constant that tends to work better now you could play around with this like so but fine adjustment is going to be difficult even if you take this position slider and you would just sit like this and it's only so much you can do here to give us the sort of effect we want can play around with the specular and roughness notes or other inputs right here there we go ah I like this a lot better than we had previously so let's smash f12 and see how she looks very nice [Music] all right what if you want a more comic book kind of look what if he wants some ordered dinner it well give it a shot so first things first we're gonna remove our collar arms are mixed sewed we're gonna leave the is silly the mapping though - we're gonna leave the texture coordinate and the shade of to RGB node intact so we're gonna bring in well another mapping node we're gonna use our window coordinates as the vector and we're gonna bring in a Voronoi texture plug that into the vector plug this into the output scale it up that's not exactly what we're looking for so let's change this to a smooth f1 and crank down the randomness that is slightly better but as you can see our pattern here has a problem in that it is stretched in the X so let's just fix that real quick very nice screwing it down a little bit very good ok so now let's bring in a math node shove that in here shove that in here boom what do we get slightly better ok let's get some control over this let's add a color ramp to our setup switch it's constant as we do and this looks a little bit better we are getting somewhere so a couple of ways this is a little bit bright for me a couple of ways we can fix this one would be to divide the value of everything by two an easier way to do this without the note is just to take our lamp crank down the brightness by half of that it's looking a little better especially if we add some more notes here for some mid-tones here maybe Oh like so and Excel there is something else we can do in between the add node and the caller and to make this slightly less come a lot more effective so we're gonna do we're gonna duplicate this these nodes these math nodes over here we're gonna duplicate them twice yep now this first node we're going to multiply by ten then we're gonna use the second node and put it into round mode there it is and the third node we're gonna divide ten okay fifteen still not good enough go let's take a look oh right divide that's what we want now this has posterized our image a little bit this is a simplified version of posterization math and we get here right now is sort of more mid-tones to control this gives us a greater range of what we can do with this and of course as usual we can take this change the callers make this like it's orange this nice yellow and as usual smash f12 there we go you

Channel: MarginallyCompetent

Views: 42,841

Rating: 4.9442897 out of 5

Keywords: blender, npr, cartoon, shader, tutorial, beginner, basics, dithering, hatching

Id: PRjQkCGv4ds

Length: 15min 45sec (945 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 10 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/minnie_so_da]

I've been wanting to learn more about cartoon shading and this was great, thanks for posting! Love that you left the mistakes in, helps us learn too!