Cinema 4D Tutorial - 5 Ways to Create Cel Shading in Cinema 4D

everybody it's EJ from Ida's I'm calm and today I'm going to be covering five count of five different ways that you can create cell shading in your 3d compositions using cinema 4d now the first two ways are going to be using the sketching toon module which is only available to those of you out there who have the studio or visualize versions of cinema 4d but never fear I'm going to be covering three other alternative ways that you can create cell shading using any other version of cinema 4d and that includes the free version of cinema 4d semaphore T light that comes with creative clouds After Effects so let's jump in and let's create some fun 2d stuff in 3d alright so the first two ways to create cel-shaded 3d objects in cinema 4d are going to be using the sketching toon module which is only available to those of you who have cinema 4d version studio in visualize so if you don't have those versions no worries the I'll be going over a few more ways to greet create cell shading that you can do in any version and that includes cinema 4d lite so the first thing I'm going to do is with all of these effects that I'm going to be doing to apply cel shading I'm going to be working with the interactive render region here so I'm just going to see a nice visual feedback of what's going on when I apply effects and this is mainly because a lot of the effects that I'll be applying don't aren't represented accurately in your just general viewport so so I have interactive render each on so basically just to set up the scene I have just a bunch of just normal diffuse colors in here just normal colors no reflectance no specular nothing just straight-up color with some diffuse shading and the first thing I'm going to do is we're going to use sketch in tune and we're just going to apply that as an effect and this is going to be a global effect so you can see as I apply the sketch in tune render setting or the effect that everything our scene is affected and two things happen number one we have outlines on outlining all of our objects in our scene as well as some like simplified shading so we now have like color bands instead of that smooth diffuse shading so those are the two things that happen when you apply the sketching toon effect to your entire scene so let's just I'm not going to deal with lines right now we're just going to deal with the cell shading here which we have a little bit of that going on right now to get rid of the lines though I'm just going to change the thickness value of the lines and the render settings down to zero so that just controls the thickness of those strokes that are applied via sketch in tune so I'm just going to get rid of that and basically what's going on our scene is all controlled in this sketch in tune shading Tam you see that we also have our background turned white from what it was from before was black so two things happen we have this background color that's applied and we also have our shading quantize down to six shades of color so you can see that's why we went from that smooth diffuse shading and that just the sketching tune just kind of change that into six bands of colors so you can see we got six bands of colors going on with most of our objects here and we can control that very easily by just you know decreasing the quantized number so we're limiting the shades so now we can have like super cell shaded kind of stuff and this is very limited because you can't really can control where your specular highlights are anything like that but you can crank this up even more and you see we have a lot of more banding going on so that is just the quantize model the other model is gradient and this is where you have a lot more control and the overriding theme of cell shading in cinema 4d is that most of it's done by gradients with no interpolation between each of these color chips right here so everything is going to be very driven by this gradients going to be a reoccurring theme in this whole entire tutorial for the cell shading so we this method it's a lot you have a lot more control over how your shades of color are being applied across your 3d objects so you can see that we have these four knots here these four gradient color chips and we can move these and you can see this is kind of controlling where these color values are distributed along our objects you can see as I have this white ship which is the brightest color I move it over to the left you can see what a lot more of that lighter color is being represented and if I bring all these color chips to the right though you're going to see all of the darker colors are being represented I can move this very dark black chip over and you can see exactly what's happening we have more of those dark values which are just completely black covering most of our scene so that's kind of how we can control cell shading is via this gradient with the color chips here and we're also taking into account the illumination the shadows that are being driven by any lights that are in our kit in our scene so right now let me see if I can find a light I don't know if I have any lights on right now but I can bring an infinite light in here and it's going to use that one light and you can see that we can also go in here and get some shadows going and this is very important because most of the light sources that I'm going to be using is an infinite light with hard shading with hard bright Ray's shadows because if I just have soft shadows here you're gonna see that it kind of works okay but it's kind of smudgy and blobby so typically I'll just go hard shading with a hard shadow so we got nice crisp shadows there and the reason why I use infinite lights is because it's this massive light source and you can see the difference between using a Omni light and a infinite light and this is actually new this actually kind of works well for the scene having this Omni light because it looks like this fire is that's where it's kind of casting the shadows and the light source and all that good stuff so I'll turn on hard shadows here too so it all depends on what you're seeing is you can see if I'm trying to light this entire scene with just this one light it's kind of difficult but typically I'll use an infinite light because it's cast this huge massive light source all the light all the objects are being shaded kind of similarly so that's just the stylistic choice that I like to make so that is using the sketch in tune render settings again this is a global option for applying the same kind of cell shading to every single object in your scene but if you want a little bit more control that's where another little handy cell shading tool comes in handy and that is the cell shader so I'm just going to go and this is the tree right here so this tree material I'm going to turn off this color Channel and I'm just going to go in the luminance blow out what's in here and let's actually just copy this color Channel in there just for the time being so that's all the these two trees right here I'm affecting those two so I'm just going object level here and what we're going to do is load up in the sketching toon module with a cell shader now this is going to be you're going to be able to apply cell shading to individual objects so it's a little bit more control over that global sketch into an effect option so same kind of thing again we got an old friend the no interpolation gradient here and you can see that when I twirl down that little arrow and by default it's set to just blue diffuse and we got three shades of blue but we can go ahead and say you know let's let's go ahead and grab this kind of green color and let's try to get that in there get some green something like that and then I'll just delete these two gradient knots and just duplicate them and I'll just make this chip a little bit lighter and then this chip I'll just make white so you can see exactly what's going on here we got this nice highlight here and again it controls the same way as that shading option in the global sketch and sketch in toon settings but the main difference is is by default with the cel shader we have a light in our scene but actually it's not our cell shaders not using the light because we don't have lights turned on so right now by default it's using our camera as a light source so the camera view is just shining this bright light just head-on and most of the time it doesn't look that good so what I'm going to do is just turn off camera and now it's not using any light source at all but then to use the actual lights in our scene we just have to enable the light option and that will then take into account our our infinite light here and the thing about infinite lights is it doesn't matter where you have this light positioned in your scene you can see that nothing changed it's all about the angle the angle is what is going to control how the the cel shading is cast onto your object as far as a light source goes so the angle controls everything there so we can just have it like that on top and you're going to see that no shadows are being applied to our associate here and that's because we also need to enable shadows so once I turn on the shadows there you can see that we now have that shadow going on we have different uh shadow modes we can you right now it's just multiplying on top of the color values we have here we can actually use the light shadow so the color is driven by the actual color of our of our shadow here so I can go and change this to say like a darker green something like that so that's very handy I'm just going to reset that to black so we have a few different options here but basically this is how you can create cell shading on individual using individual textures and apply them to individual objects so again this has a lot more control versus the global sketching tune options so those are two ways using sketching tune module to create cell shading so the next example I want to show is using two different kind of lights so this is going to kind of be creating recreating the global sketch and tune effect that applies the same level of shading cell shading to everything in our scene and the way I'm going to do this is by using two lights it's very simple this method is useful for people who have any other version of cinema 4d including cinema 4d Lite so how does this method go so right now let me just go into interactive render region here you can see that we have no lights in our scene but I can bring a light in here just a typical Omni light I'm just going to position this straight ahead in our scene you can see we have all this diffuse shading and all that good stuff but it doesn't look all that great right doesn't look like cel shading or anything at all yet but what we're going to use this Omni light for is to kind of cast a equal level of light throughout all of our objects so it's basically what we want to do is with our materials again these are just materials with just some basic diffuse and a little bit of just default specular to them so just basic basic materials with just different colors loaded up and what we want to do is make them all lumen in right because that's basically what we're doing with the cel shader and everything else is we're loading in cell shaders to our luminance channel and the way we can do that using a light is by using the ambient illumination option here and you can see that when I turn that on we just have flat colors so we're just getting the actual colors that are loaded into our color channels of each of our textures then it's just flat we have no no longer do we have any diffuse shading at all so this is the first step that's our first light I can just rename this ambient loom so we know what's going on there so the next step now is to actually go ahead and create a second light and again I love using a infinite lights for cell shading so I'm just going to grab an infinite light and you can kind of see how with that second light in there the second infinite light we're kind of getting some shading back but everything is kind of blown out all the colors are blown out so we can kind of bring down this intensity of our ambient illumination light here you can see we're getting a little bit closer but the thing is especially on our trees here we still have a ton of diffuse shading so the one thing we can do to then really add some contrast and crunch these diffuse colors down to a cell shading type of look to are all the objects in our scene is by going into the details tab here and we have this contrast option which I know is kind of weird like why would you have a contrast option on a light but actually it's very useful for cell shading because what we can do is if I bring up this contrast to a hundred percent you can see what that does is kind of does like a curves crushing those those color values down or those shading values so I'm just going to zoom in to this tree you can see the difference between 0% contrast and one % we're kind of really clamping down and crushing those dark levels so what I'm going to do is just really crank up the contrast and you're going to see when I bring this up to 200 you can now see that hey we got some just crunched 3d ARRA cel-shaded shading on our objects here we can crank this up even more and really just pare that down and on this tree trunk here let's see the cylinder right here we can actually just turn off this reflectance and that should fix that a little bit there we go so you can see that we now have the cel shading effect we are kind of really bright though we have our colors blown out so again we can just go and bring this color down and again we can change the angle of this light so this is kind of a little bit of a hack to add some quick cell shading to our entire scene here by using two lights we can also use an omni light as well with this kind of option you can see we have a little bit more control here's something like that and again we can use some hard Rache Rache a doze to get some shading in here so that looks really nice right I'm actually just going to go back to infinite light here and you can see that by using two lights one with ambient illumination turned on and one with some contrast in the details tab we basically just kind of recreated that whole sketch Intune effect that is applied globally now you cannot really affect how how many shades are being shone basically you're just limited to two shades you're limited to the bright color and then a darker shade of that color so if you want like a two toned sketch in tune or cel-shaded kind of look this is a good kind of hack to create your your cell shading throughout your whole scene so a we also want to be able to have object level control like we did with the sketching toons sell shader with our scenes so that's what I'm going to be going over now so basically we just have this diffuse shading material here just the little magenta color loaded up I'm going to go into interactive render region and basically we're going to hack together some effects instead of a 4d that will recreate the sketch in toon cel shader so what I'm going to do is just double click on this material and again with most of our cells basically all of our cell shading all of our stuff all of our colors and cell shading is going to happen in this luminance channel so what I'm going to do is just copy this color and just turn on the luminance and what I want to do actually I didn't need to copy that color what I'm going to do is load up some specular into the luminance channel so what I can do to do that is load up my Loomis channel and you can see that we just loaded up a specular channel in a luminance shader in the luminance channel which is very useful because now we have like a diffuse shading in a bright luminance channel that we can now if I turn off all this active stuff we can kind of hack the luma shader which is usually used for like brush Mel effects and use it to create a hack together cel shader so the first thing I want to do to make this work is basically I'm just going to plan out ahead what I'm what I'm going to be doing is I'm going to use this specular shader I'm going to use something similar to like Colorama in After Effects or the sketching tune quantized effect where we can limit this specular shading or this diffuse shading we load it into this luminance channel and just make it into a specific number of shades of color so that's kind of what I'm doing and the first thing I want to do is right now we don't have the full specs of gray values we now have like 50% grade to 100% black so what I'm going to do is bring up the illumination to say 120 130 maybe 150 let's do that so now we can see that we have close to 100% white and then we have 100% black so we're getting that full spectrum of grayscale values which is very important because now what we're going to do is load up a layer shader and basically what that does is going to put that luma shader in a layer stack now we can start working like we're in Photoshop and we can start applying other effects so what I'm going to do is go and use the colorize effect and what's going to happen is number one everything is going to turn to black because what I'm going to do is click and drag here and create some gradient knots and you're going to see that what happens is is just like Colorama we're mapping those black and white grayscale values that we had in our Loomis Channel and we're remapping them to different colors so remember everything we're doing with the cel shader is all going to be driven by a gradient with no interpolation right so I'm just going to turn the interpolation to none I'm just going to move this gradient not over here in wallah look at that we now have our like quantized shading effect that we had from our self shader and again this is as a material so we can apply this to individual objects we have object level control so what we can do is just go in here and just get those different magenta values so something like that and then we'll get that magenta ikana color and then we can add like a nice specular highlight here so you can see exactly what's going on we just hacked together the lamar shader loaded up the specular channel in our luminance channel and then just colorized it and constrained it to three shades of color using this gradient with no interpolation and we got our cell shader basically that works with any version of cinema 4d even cinema 4d lite so again I can go in here and we can again use this infinite light to control everything we can also turn on the shadow ray trace shadows here and then I'll just rotate this light you see we have this really cool nice hot pink move logo pretty dang cool right so that's our basically using the two lights to create sketch in toon global cell shading and then using the luma shader with colorizer to create or recreate the sketch in toon cell shader so there's one last way to create cell shading in cinema 4d any version of cinema 4d and this is very useful for when you want to create like infographic II stuff where you don't want to maybe you don't want to have a light control all where your color values are because remember in all of our other examples like this move how these colors are or how these great how these colors are mapped onto our 3d objects all driven by this light but what if you want to have very precise colors map to different parts of your objects but you don't want to create different lights for each individual object well this is where something called the fall-off shader comes very in handy because you can see here how we have all these different blue values map to different parts of this laptop here which is very handy especially for like a lot of infographic work where you have more boxy shaped things and you don't want and you have many of these objects in one scene in say an illustrator and that was working in it illustrator is making these elements in ways that's very hard to recreate in 3d using cell shading with lights and then say you know you have different colors coming from different angles and then you have to create different lights for each individual object it just becomes a really huge pain so to be able to recreate it have a lot more control on an object level without using lights of how your cell shading is applied to an object we can use something called a fall-off shader now I'm just going to blow this out the the fall-off shader I currently have in here you can see that now we just have a white luminance color load it up in our luminance channel so everything looks flat so what I'm going to do is just load up the fall-off shader here you can see what that's going to do again we have our friendly neighborhood gradient that we're going to use for again everything so you can see what's going on here we're loading up a gradient right now we have some interpolation which we don't want but by default what's going on here what's going on with the cell with the fall-off shader here is it's applying a gradient and it's using the normals of your object to color your to color every single object in your scene and we have this direction in the space so I'm just going to stay in object space but this direction is very important because this controls how the gradients apply to your object now these three values represent x y and z so it's almost like we're using the direction of these three values here to kind of say hey position the cell shader light or that infinite light in this direction so right now we have a value of 1 in the Y so it looks like a light source is up in positive Y if we go in bring this down to say negative 3 or negative 1 you're going to see that it looks like the light source is coming from below so you can't see what we're going what we're doing here is using this direction to basically position where our quote-unquote light source is going to be that's going to then cast these colors this gradient color across our object so the first thing I want to do is just create a gradient with no interpolation at all so we got like our nice cell shading here right and then we can go ahead and change these colors to you know those blue shades or green whatever we're doing here and let me just create that and then we'll get just the bright blue there so now we have our colors loaded up but we now can control where the light source is so right now I have it have like the light source coming from negative x and negative Y so negative 1 and negative 1 in each you can even see in the material preview here that we now have like this diagonal composition here and we can also bring this into negative Y or negative x sorry and this is kind of controlling it z space so this is the z space here so right now our light source is kind of coming from the front of our scene and negative Z if we move it back you can see that a lot of our dark colors it looks like a light source is back in z space over here positive Z space so this is very handy when you have a lot of objects in your scene that you want very specific colors being cast onto different phases of your objects see like boxes and stuff like that I found that this is very handy to be able to control what's going on with all these different shades and then we can also just you know maybe we want a darker shade over here see what that looks like maybe we don't want that so you can see what's going on here can add more gradient knots and say I want the top of the keyboard to are the keys on the keyboard to be more illuminated so I can just move the light a little further up in Y and maybe let's see what's going on here let's actually bring it more negative Z space so our light sources a little bit more to the front and you can see that this is very predictable how this is working again you're kind of just pushing these values in different directions to kind of act as the light source in how these color values are mapped onto your individual objects right now I'm just adjusting the Y and probably want the Y up a little bit so something like that right and then we can just manually just these knots and that's going to kind of change how those colors are mapped onto our object just like the cell shader just like that colorizer only we're not using any lights in our scene which is kind of very interesting and useful alright so there you go five different ways to create cell shading in cinema 4d so you guys have a lot of options there so what I want you to do is to go out and try all these different methods if you have any questions be sure to hit it in the comment section and if you make anything I definitely want to see so share it with me thanks again for watching and remember if you liked this tutorial be sure to like it smash that like button and be sure to subscribe so you can keep up to date with all the latest cinema 4d training and tutorials that I pump out thank you guys so much for watching I'll see you in the next tutorial bye everybody

Channel: eyedesyn

Views: 179,608

Rating: 4.9597316 out of 5

Keywords: Motion Graphics, Design, Cinema 4d, 3D Modeling (Profession), Mograph, eyedesyn, c4d tut, cinema 4d tutorial, c4d tutorial, c4d, cinema 4d, maxon, cinema4d, mograph, motion graphics, cel shading tutorial, cel shading in cinema 4d tutorial, cell shading tutorial, sketch and toon tutorial, sketch & toon tutorial, cel shading, cartoon render, 2d shading, 2d shading in cinema 4d, cel shader c4d, lumas shader, falloff shader

Id: vrCW7Z4TYnc

Length: 30min 22sec (1822 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 19 2016