Cinema 4D Tutorial - Creating a Cartoon Render Using the Cel Shader

hey everybody it's EJ from IU's I'm calm and today we're going to be pushing the limits of the sketching toon cell shader and we're going to be going way beyond just your typical two-tone cell shading that you typically see in a lot of animations these days and we're going to create some really cool fun stylized cel shading release some cool cartoony styles using the cell shader we're going to cover a little bit of some very easy espresso that's really going to help speed up your workflow and we're going to have some fun with my favorite deform or the G go to form at the very end of this tutorial so be sure to stay tuned to that so let's push the limits of the sketching toon cell shader [Applause] [Music] alright so this is a let's just call him blink links a little brother who maybe had way too much coffee but today we're going to be going into how you can create cool cartoon looks and really push the sketching toon cell shader a little bit further than your typical cel shading that you see a lot these days so this is just your standard two-tone cell shading but I'm going to show a few other ways you can get a little bit more stylized maybe go tritone get some more cool stylize shades in there and even how to get some cool noisy grainy type of renders as well so let's just start uh just very basic so let me just go into my interactive render region here so I can actually see what my render is going to look like and just make sure your little triangle here is set to the top because this is this just controls the quality you bring that all the way up you can also right click on this little triangle to go to alpha mode so you can just see your gray grid coordinate grid just back there too if you want so here is what I got so far and I have three materials that are making up my blank my little blink character here he's actually even animated and he's super happy he wants some more coffee someone gave him some ice cream and a puppy he's so excited so I'm going to actually cover how I animated his um hair and stuff at the end of this tutorial so stay tuned for that but just some very basic materials so the main key to creating cool 2d style effects in cinema 4d is to just live and play in this luminance texture if you're not familiar with luminance or just 3d in general so typically when you create a new material it comes equipped with both its election images let me just create a new material just from the get-go so I just created a new material by double clicking in my material manager down here and you're going to see that what happens is we have a color channel set to like a like a quarter gray something like that and then we have a specular channel here as well and specular is basically just like a fake reflection right so that's the two things that happen when you create a new material but when you want to create 2d style things in 2d style shading you don't want any of this diffuse and this is diffuses basically the the shading that happens with lighting in your in your scene so we have this gradient that is giving the illusion of this sphere or the circle being a sphere because we have this nice gradation we can see where the lights coming from and illuminating our our object here but if we turn off the color and we turn off the specular and we just turn on the luminance here we're actually going to lose all that diffuse shading we're going to get a flat circle so we have no more fear anymore so let's just go ahead and go back into our skin texture here again I'll turn off the color in the reflectance and turn on the luminance and again we have this flat texture here but what is great about cell shading is we can reintroduce some of that some of that shading some of that lighting but it's very limited to just say a couple of shades of color so to do this to get my cell shading can kind of go beyond just the flat look and actually you know this looks pretty good in itself if you're just going to do a very flat stylized type of animation you still get all this nice parallaxing and stuff of his head turning and all that good stuff just by using this flat luminance color so that's just your bare bones very basic just dipping your toe in the pool of 2d in seven 4d just using luminance but where the fun really starts is when we start using some of the tools in the sketch into module let me just move this window up here go all the way down to sketch in tune now sketching Tunes only included if you have the cinema 4d version studio or visualize so if you don't have those to actually have other tutorials where you can actually try to recreate this cell shader that is included in sketching too I'll link it to this video right now right about now and so cell shader right here in sketch in tune I'm going to load that up and what's going to happen is we have this gradient pop-up and if we click on the cell shader button we're going to see what's actually happening here so let me just go back to frame 0 and two things are happening number one we have this gradient that has just three color shifts or three tones of this blue so we have light blue this medium blue and this little bit darker blue and that's applied to our model now the light source because you need a light source to be able to determine where these colors are mapped to and the light source is actually the camera at this point so the the light source is coming straight from our camera view that we're in right now so what we can do with this diffuse gradient in the SEL shader is move these color chips around and basically this is going to change how these colors are mapped to the contour or along the surface of our objects so you can see as I move colored shifts more to the left more of that color is going to be present on our objects and the converse is if we move the color chips to the right you're going to see less and less of that object or less and less of that color so you can see as I move this lighter blue color chip all the way to the right you can see we're seeing less and less of that mapped onto objects so that's just very very basic stuff so what I can do is if I want to actually use a light as the light source so you can see in my scene I actually have a light down here and it's just your standard Omni light and the most important thing about using lights with cel shader is that you want to have a ray traced hard shadow because of course we're dealing with 2d you don't want a soft shadow when everything else in your scene is is just nice sharp edges so using this ray trace hard shadow is going to give you a nice sharp hard shadow there so where we can only utilize that in the shadows and all that stuff when we actually turn on lights and what that's going to do is it's going to utilize the light source in your scene or any light so right now I just have this one light if you have multiple lights it'll use all those lights in your scene or you can just choose a light so if you have many lights in your scene but you only want one light to actually drive the texture the cel shading on one material this is nice for you know very object level control you just drag a drag and drop a light in there and you can exclude it or you can just include that so that's kind of important so I'll just delete that and so now we're using that light source and again we have the hard shadow on there so we can actually go ahead and turn on shadows in our cell shader to recognize this shadow so now you can see that the hair is casting this really nice shadow on there but the one way I like to work in using the cel shader is instead of trying to so choosing all the different shades of color that we want to use and you know we could totally do that and just change this to a more of a skin tone maybe he's been tanning for too long with that kind of orange skin there but what I like to do to be able to actually control the cel-shading for all of the objects in my scene or all the materials in my scene actually is to do a little workflow hack and that is to instead of using color chips in here so say I just want to do a two-tone cell shading for right now if you want to get more stylized so if you want your darker shade to be a blueish thing that get some really cool color combinations and stuff like that you could totally do that just use these color chips and then just you know work individually and adding cell shaders to the luminance on these textures as well but what I like to do to kind of speed up my workflow is to just use grayscale values in the cell shaded ships here now what this is going to do is make your make your character into a ghost basically but what we can do is when we go back into luminance we can go into this mixed mode and instead of normal we can actually multiply this cell shader on top of our actual color here that's in our luminance channel so just like in Photoshop or After Effects we have these blending modes and what I'll do is I'll just choose multiply and then what will happen is this cell shader gradient will multiply on top of this color and you'll get this nice two-tone cell shading on top of our little object here our face using this this tan skin texture so what I can do to actually have all the changes and apply this cell shader to these other objects versus having to like manually copy and paste this into each one but then if I change something here it won't update there I'd actually have to go into this material as well and then adjust the shading and the color chips in here to prevent all of that and to be able to control ourselves a ting in here to actually control the cell shading on these two other materials in our scene we're going to do we're going to use what is equivalent to the pick whip in After Effects so if you're use if you used to working in After Effects the pick whip you can have one thing drive another things so like the position you can have that drive multiple positions on other objects this is basically what we're going to be doing here and the pick whip equivalent in semaphore D is called set driver set driven so what you need to do to to initiate this is just whatever you want to have be driven by one object or one one parameter to affect another parameter is you need to right-click on the on the object you or on the parameter you want to be the main parent or that that main driver and just go to expressions and set driver so basically what this is going to do is whatever happens in this texture field I want this to drive something else and what that something else is are these two other texture fields in this luminance channel so what I'll do is I'll just right click the same thing right click the texture a word here go to expressions again and then just say set driven and then what's going to happen is you can see automatically we have that cell shading from our original material here on the skin and it's now applied to our two other materials and the great part is I already had the mix mode set to multiply so you can just do that manually if you want as well so I just said that to multiply so this will multiply on top of this color here and the great part about this is is this is now linked no pun is intended this is a link so what happens is it creates a null with a expresso tag on it now expresso could be kind of daunting to some people but it's really really easy to use the set driver set driven and have expresso just do all of the expression work in the background so expresso is the equivalent of expressions and after-effects and it's very very simple stuff so basically you can see what's happening is the skin texture so that texture that we selected is linked to the orange texture in the illuminance as well so you can just see this is a very set up but it's doing it all behind the scenes you don't even have to worry about what's going on there but set driver set driven I have a tutorial all about other really useful workflow hats that you can use and really speed up your workflow using set drivers that you have and I'll link to that right now as well but now you can see that I can actually move this coach if I was going to effect and change and drive the other self shader shaders in the other material so this is really easy to be able to modify and try to see what kind of looks look good what kind of look that you're going for and not have to keep updating other materials as well so this is really going to speed up your cel shader workflow so so this is your basic two-tone cell shading so the cool thing about cel shading is it's all based on a gradient right but we're not just limited to just two tones we can also add like a third color chip here and just make that a little bit darker and we have this tritone thing going on very easy simple stuff and again this is all linked let's set driver set driven so it's also being applied to the rest of the materials on our object but the cool thing is is we can actually twirl down this diffuse gradient here and the main way this is really creating a cool cell shading look is that there's no interpolation between these gradient colors so it's just great straight to this mid gray straight to white there's no smoothing or anything in there and that's creating this cool cartoon look but say you want to try to create maybe a different kind of cartoon style or maybe comic book-like comic like new comic books these days have really cool stylized cartoon shading so what we can do to try to emulate that kind of style is to change the interpolation from none to smooth not and what that's going to do is create some smoothing between all of our color chips and it's giving you a little bit more of that 3d depth you can definitely sense more of the 3d geometry making up this object but it's very stylized it still looks fairly flat so what we can do is we have full flexibility is like dragging this little diamond here and having having this gradient be very sharp and then smooth from this darker color all the way to this gray color and I can actually move this white color chip all the way to the right and making it more smoothing and again I can adjust this color chip here as well so we can get some really interesting looks because you can see that I have a sharp interpolation between this darker shade and then it kind of smoothes out from that middle gray to white again we can adjust this very easily so again this is super super useful for creating and pushing the cell shader beyond just that typical two-tone cell shading that you typically see in a lot of people's work my work included but this is just a way to get more stylized so you can add more color chips to your heart's extent if you want to do that so next I'm going to cover specular and this will actually turn on specular highlights in our cell shader and you'll see that pop up right here we have a few gradient knots but the one thing you're going to notice is that because we're using this workflow where we have all of these cell shaders linked in the cell shading is actually multiplied on top of a color all of our specular highlights are kind of washed out and kind of faint and that's just due to that blending mode so what I like to do when utilizing this workflow is to just create a whole new material and this will just be the specular highlight and what I'm going to do is turn on the luminance just keep it pure white and then go on to the alpha Channel turn this on and apply a cell shader in here so let's just go ahead and load this up and apply this to some of the hair objects here so we've got the big piece there the sideburn and then the right here P so you can see that we have a little bit of that orange popping through here but as we know alphas work with you know black and white mattes in in this instance so we're going to go ahead and instead of just using Blues I'm just choose one black ship and one white chip you're going to see that now we're only seeing the part of the of this white luminance where we have this gradient not and again this is a you know we've just loaded up a brand new cell shader so the default light source is camera I can go ahead and turn on lights and you can see that now we have these nice bright highlights on our object which is really nice so again we can control how thin that specular highlight is based on this diffuse not and the nicest thing about this is remember we have this light exclusion so we can actually choose a light to just drive the specular so if we want some really nice specular hits right on the edges of our hair we can go ahead and do that so what I'll do is I got my main light here I'll just duplicate this name this my spec light specular light and for this I don't even need the shadows on so I'll just change that to none and what I'll say is okay this specular SEL shader I just want to use or include the specular light in here and then conversely I'll go into my other SEL shader and say exclude this specular light from affecting any of these other materials so that one specular material or the one specular light will just affect this specular material so now what I can do is just independently move this one light and it's just going to control the specular highlights which is really nice so now we got this really nice specular hit on the hair that's looking really good and again we can get full control over how that specular looks and we can even go back into our cell shader here and say maybe we want a little bit more more more of that light hit to happen but you can see this is what we kind of you know anime ish where you just have this nice little specular light hit on the of the object which is really nice one thing I want to cover as well is the back facing here so back facing means so right by default this gradient this diffuse gradient is just being applied to the front of this object but if you turn back facing this will actually apply this gradient to the front and the back of this material or of this object so I can actually make this fairly thin and you can see the difference between back facing and no back facing is that actually makes it smaller because it's not applied through the back in the front of this object and what we're going to do is actually see this a lot more prominently if I go ahead and say I want to go into my skin cell shading here go to my skin cell shader and maybe I want to make this darker so we have some really nice contrast you're going to see how much of that darker color is on this if I turn back facing you're going to see even less of it and I'm going to have to actually move these gradient knots a little bit more to the right for even that darker shade to show up because you can see that this gradients not just being applied to the front but also the back of my objects so keep that in mind when you're dealing with cell shading if you have a gradient not all the way to the left and you're still seeing way too much of that shade turn on back facing and that will kind of solve things so I'll just turn this off for now one other cool thing I like to do is to push this even further we can utilize the bump channel and add a little bit of grain so what I'm going to do is go into the bump channel here on my skin texture just enable it and I'm going to go to texture and I'm just going to grab a noise shader here and what I'm going to do is just make this noise shader a little bit smaller because that noise a little bit too big and then I'll add a little bit of contrast here and you're going to notice that the bump is not affecting anything at all it's not affecting our cell shader well what's going on to have the bump channel affect the cell shader we actually need to go one step further in our cell shooter actually turn on use bump and what's going to happen as you can see set now he looks like a pimple face or something like that not quite sure what's going on there but all we need to do but we can see that the bump channel is doing something now with that used bump right so we can go into our bump channel and the one thing I notice is that that global scale needs to come down way a little bit further and now he looks like he has stubble all over his face but we get this nice little this really nice grain happening now to actually control how much of this bump is going across his the geometry here all we have to do is adjust the strength and you'll see that as I bring the strength down that bump will be more confined to the actual actual leg darker shades of this objects you're going to see it less in the lighter spots and more in the darker spots and you can see that even better here and it just adds a really nice grainy type of look and you see this kind of style a lot in infographics and a lot of After Effects 2d animations so you can do that very simply here as well and again the great part about making things in 3d if you need a turn ahead you don't need some complex head rig or expressions you just you literally rotate the head and everything turns and all that good stuff no no crazy expression so again we can use that set driver set driven workflow to have this texture field on our skin on our skin texture drive the bump channel or the bump texture field on our other materials here so I'll turn on bump and I'll right-click and just say set driven and again you can now see that nice create that nice shading on our other objects as well and you can go ahead and adjust the strength on each of these maybe seven on that we can also link the strength on this as well so I can just right click on this expression set driver and then on the strength on the other two textures just say set driven boom we have everything being controlled by the strength slider on our skin texture here so as I adjust this it's controlling everything else and looking really nice looking really good cool so just some really nice ways you can push the cell shader a little bit further and again just to go back to all of those different looks and just see the difference so here's what we just made right and there's like a more stylized tritone gradient again with more smoothing interpolation between those gradient knots here's one with just a two tone and messing around with the the interpolation between each color and then we have just your typical two-tone cell shading very reminiscent of you know that new link video game and all that good stuff so that was I believe that's just - two-tone cell shading - so dissociate er can really do a lot if you push it push it real good tail so and again we can see are there expressions that popped up here all controlling the different things you can kind of get a good sense and again you don't even need to touch that that's all happening in the background just like using pick whip expressions in After Effects so now that we've gone through all those looks let's go ahead and I'm going to go and this is we're going to have a little bonus a little bonus section on how I animated the hair here to have that nice little jiggle I'm going to have a bonus jiggle added to this so what I'm going to do first is going to get out of in or let's keep interactive render region on and I'm just going to go ahead and just select all these objects that have the jiggle de forma on it already so all of my little hair pieces here and what I'm going to do is just go ahead and I want to store this as a selection so I don't want to have to go and manually select all these objects again and again so what I'll do is do a very helpful thing and create a selection object and what a selection objects going to do by just go to select create selection object is it's going to allow me to restore those fat selection that I just and by simply double-clicking on this little icon here and then it just automatically selects all those objects again so very very very super useful workflow enhancement there using the selection object and what I'll do is I'll just go ahead and delete all the jiggles here delete all of the jiggles but then what I'll do is just make sure I have those objects back again so these are the ones I need to apply the jiggle to and I'm also going to delete the wind wind object there because that'll come in handy later so here we go these are the objects I need to apply the Jupiter farmer to so I'll go and just apply get the jiggle of the plumber here and let's see what were those ones again so this is even good as a reference to so I can just say okay the Hat I'll just go ahead and bring my hat down there and then I can actually lock this as well so I can lock this in my view so I can keep looking and referencing this so the jiggle deformers on the Hat it's on the sideburn both sideburns it's also on the hair and the hairpiece are so it's also helpful to actually name your things somewhat coherent lis so you know what each thing is doing you can see that everything has some really nice jiggle going on right now just very nice jiggly but we actually need to have sort of like an anchor point because you can see specifically in the Hat here that it's just jiggling all over the place and we actually need to adjust it so the base of the Hat is not jiggling so much in similar things with like the the sideburns here as well so the way to do that and I can actually unlock my selection object here so I can actually select things like let's see what's the right here P so this is the hair piece let's actually just deal with the Hat so I got my jig reformer here and what I'm going to do is utilize a fall-off and what the fall is going to do it's going to be very similar to fall off in a where if you change this fall-off shape from say incident to let's just say like a fear and then just position this and let's go into our for up view by hitting this little corner button here and what I'm going to do is just make this sphere big enough that it is encompassing the base of the Hat so that what this is going to do is say only jiggle everything inside of this circle but actually we don't want that we actually want the inverse of that so what we'll do is just invert that and what that will do then is anything inside this circle will not have jiggle and everything outside will have jiggle so that's kind of what we want we want this the base of the hat to not have so much jiggle and everything outside here to have a little bit of jiggle and we could have used a linear fault as well but let's just see how this looks now so you can see there's still not enough you can see it especially on our right view we don't have enough width on this and let's actually just make this fear a little bit bigger and actually you know what let's just go ahead and use a linear instead because this will be a lot more easy to visually see here so let's go ahead and start of orientation negative Z I'll choose positive x and now you can see linearly or fall off you you just rotate this as well so let's just uncheck invert and let's just see what happens now so let's just move this up a little bit so we want the base of the cap to not jiggle and then everything else have some a little bit of jiggle and what I'll do as well as you can see that we have this little fall-off here and this this middle red plane here so basically we're going from 100% strength to or 0% strength to a hundred and then it's hundred all the way on so we've want a smoother interpolation so 0 2 all the way to 100 we can do that by cranking up the fall-off 100% and let's see what we got here so now you can see actually this is facing the wrong way because the tip of our cap is actually the anchor and everything else is jiggling so we can do one of two things we can invert or we can just change the orientation from positive x to negative x and now you can see that now the base of the cap has very little jiggle or 0% jiggle and then we have this ramp this gradient ramp almost of strength from zero all the way to 100 so you can see that there and we can even shrink this two so we can have this jiggling a little bit more and then we can start messing around with the actual jiggle options here so we can add stiffness we can add a little bit more drag so it's a lot more friction add there and see how this looks so now you can see it looks like it's underwater almost because we have so much drag here you can kind of mess around with this stuff and structural because almost like if you're if your object was made up of tiny tiny Springs the lower the structural value the more those Springs will oscillate and then the higher value of structure those Springs will stop oscillating faster so that's just as another thing you can mess around with as well and then just your overall strength right so let's just do this again that was a little bit confusing because I did a few different things let's just go ahead and go to the sideburns here and I'll select both these sideburns and just like we did previously we're just going to use a linear fall-off and we want this to face and the positive Y and again I'll just crank up the fall-off here and then I can just adjust the height of this as well so I'll just move the right-side board I believe that's the right side room actually they're both right sideburns see always helps to name things correctly because these are both named right I have no idea but it should be okay where we are going to be we're gonna survive here let's go ahead and see if we have this rectally so let's just move our deformers down a little bit here so what should happen is the anchor should be or the less jiggle should be applied to the top here let's just move this down a little bit more so it's a little bit more pronounced you can definitely see that the top of the sideburn is not moving in the bottom of the sideburn is definitely having all that jiggle and we can definitely see this a lot more if we make this even even shorter you can definitely see that but you want some a little bit of smoothing between where jiggle is and where it doesn't so I think that's looking pretty good and again we can go into the jiggle options here just the stiffness adjust the drag and the structural can see if I bring the structural way down you can see is a lot more springy especially if I bring the stiffness down as well we just have some weird stuff happen in there you definitely see that there's a lot more geometry deformation so I'm just going to keep the structural fairly high and the stiffness high as well because we don't want that actually intersecting with the face it's not a good thing but there we go and then you know we just do the same exact thing with top of the hair here we'll just use a different we'll just use the linear again and we can even just rotate this in the right direction bring the fall-off all the way up and again you can see by the arrow that we're actually facing the wrong direction because it's actually going from 100% strength to zero and we'll just scale this down here and actually that's the opposite way let's do a negative Z and now we've got now that's the ticket now it's facing in the right direction we have more of the anchor happening here let's just move this out so you can see so you can see the zero percent strength to 100% strength and there we go so that's basically how I created the jig leanness there one cool thing you can do with Jibo deformers is it has this really cool forces tab and what you can do is use particle forces up in the simulate menu here you can use particle forces and the thing I added to have just his hair just gracefully blowing in the wind is just to add a wind object here and then I can just move this around and just say which way I want his hair to blow and you can see this little arrow right here I'll just have the wind blow from left to right and just make sure this is affecting it and it's not affecting the jiggle because we actually need to go into all of our jiggles and I can get all those jiggles by just going to my search field here but clicking little my cosine of my qualifying magnifying glass selecting all of my jiggles here and getting out of that and I have all my jiggle selected still and I'll just drag and drop that wind into my forces feel and that should now recognize the wind and you can see a slight movement by the wind but if I just turn up the wind speed you can definitely tell there's a lot of wind going on there we can add some turbulence here as well to have all this stuff move let's just crank this up fairly high now you can really see the wind gracefully wafting costing his hair links hair in the breeze and no keyframes added which is really cool now his hair here's about to fly off so that's a little bit too high oh god no no no and sometimes when that happens just don't do that hi don't type in 8000 instead of 80 don't do that okay everything is good we're back to normal alright so you can see by being just a little bit creative with how you manipulate the gradient knots in the cell shader you can create some really cool stylized cartoony looks and then go even further and introduce some bump into yourself here to create some grainy cell shading as well so there's a lot there and we also learned how to use the very basic expresso of set driven or set driver set driven and how you can really improve your workflow in your day to day work so hopefully that's very helpful to you and then we finished up by utilizing one of my favorite deformers the jib reformer and use a little bit of particle objects as well like the wind áformer to actually animate some stuff like hair and without any extra keyframes so there's a lot in this tutorial you have any questions about anything I covered be sure to post them in the comments section I'll try to get to them as fast as I can and if you create anything using any of the techniques that I showed off in this tutorial please share it with me on Instagram on Twitter on Facebook's on the my faces on your my faces all that good stuff I'd love to see what you're making out there and if you like this tutorial please hit the like button I really appreciate that and as always really appreciate all of you out there watching this tutorial I'll see you all in the next one bye everybody that did it again

Channel: eyedesyn

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Keywords: cinema 4d cel shader, cinema 4d cel shading, cel shading, cel shader, c4d cel shading, c4d cel shader, cinema 4d sketch & toon, sketch & toon, sketch and toon, c4d sketch & toon, c4d sketch and toon, c4d cartoon render, cinema 4d cartoon render, cinema 4d tutorial, cinema 4d cartoon render tutorial, learn cinema 4d, learn c4d, eyedesyn, jiggle deformer, xpresso, cinema 4d xpresso, cinema 4d anime, c4d anime, cinema 4d anime render, cinema 4d anime shading, c4d tutorial

Id: UpaXgt1W9K0

Length: 38min 48sec (2328 seconds)

Published: Wed May 03 2017