MtoA 518 | aiToon | Introduction

hey everyone and welcome back to the channel as you might have guessed this tutorial will be about Arnold toon shader which is a fairly new shader and at first it is very advanced lots of controls lots of sliders in there and I will just want to try to explain you most of the most use parameters and how to use them to get a more or less good-looking image I won't be using any diffuse textures for now it will be just procedural but you will quite quickly see the benefits of this shader and before we jump into this tutorial make sure to follow me on Instagram to always be up to date with the latest stuff I am working on and you can see there's already the tutorial published online or at least a screenshot of what we will be doing today a few days ahead so you can always be up to date what I'm doing right here and obviously the same goes on on my Twitter account where I'll be posting lots of channel infos and tutorials so let's jump into this video and you will see that I will be creating this low poly look of a car and as it is defined by a light it has a light Direction like coming from the top left defines how the color on the car is and then on the shadow side it will have a different color based on the light angle and then I also have a different guy a person actually oh well we also have the edges so these two combined these are two V's which are output by the toon share which is the edges and the beauty and combine you the combined version doesn't look as nice because it doesn't use a proper alpha Channel but if you count them together you can just multiply the edges on top of the beauty and you get an awesome result and then I have guy which is coming up right now which is this guy so I will be showing you how to get these nice contour edges this is a bit more advanced because I'm using three different types of a mask ramp to drive at the bottom you see this weird flake pattern then you get these lines and at the top you get these dots but I'll be showing you how to create that and for the beauty you can see that there's like a little rim light you can see the contours happening right here and all the stuff I will explain to you in detail and you can see this is the shader it has lots of options and by all means I won't I'm not even really familiar with this thing there like there are lots of different scenarios which you can create and you can just see the library created which is on the Arnold docks and you can create very interesting shaders with this stuff this is now using I guess they're just a contour edges and a little speck shader on top so you can see or it's it might be the highlight shade or something and it works in combination with the default shaders as well and a few limitations it doesn't doesn't work with volumes no motion blur no depth of field and no VR camera but based on that I think you can still create lots of good images and I will be showing you how it you set this stuff up and also I will be providing the scene files so the Maya file of these two models so you will get this head guy and the mattes low poly car which is here and I will be providing them on my patreon channel so be sure to be a patron on there and you can get instant access to the source files and follow along or just get the models to work with so let's jump into this so I'm just opening my viewport and I just want to delete the lights and aliy what else we need to read oh and just for now just assign a base shader the standard surface shader right so this is my model I just saved the scene as tutorial 2 and shader dots tutorial there we go and now let's just hit render and go to beauty and because we don't have any lights in the scene this is what we currently get so let's first go to viewport and let's just create another like eye for the toon shader it's it's better to use Direction lights to get these harsh lines obviously you can use also a sky dome to get softer for lofts but I just like to use that so it's up to you what you want to create but I will be showing you this with a directional light and I have selection highlighting turnoff that's why it might look confusing but this is now backed back on and let's render this guy so this is what it looks like right now and in the render settings I currently have contour shading on in my filter on default this is on Gaussian on to and then I also have a ground plane which is here and this one has a simple shadow mat shader which will give you or which will give some speck highlights and some shadow caching and then I changed in my render viewer I changed it back on color from black to like a grayish color and damage this is all I did for now so it looks nice and integrated and it's using the background shaders so this would be a black shadow I just had it a bit more lighter so you can actually see a bit and that is my setup and so let's jump right into the shader and I will be heading over to the viewport and assign a new shader I've got a favorite it's sudden my favourites yet so Arnold shader and then a toon shader assigned and on default it has a base color it has no spec and I think edges on but it requires the contour which is currently off so it won't render the edge stuff silhouette is of and the silhouette is just an outline of this of the thing base color is 0.8 White's no tone map then we have a stylized highlight rim lighting which is off transmission of emission of no bump connected so most of the things are turned off on default so if I render now heading over to the render view and update full scene run IPR so this is now running and you can see what we get the only thing is I have to a Ovie's I just created custom a of ease of the with a light path expression to show me or for a beauty shader and then I just changed the the mode to Gaussian as a fixed one for the beauty and then this one the the bigger than bracket means it's taking what is currently said in the render Global's but this should actually be contour like this and then we should be set up so now the edges is rendering contour shader which is this on default and then we've got the beauty from toon shader so if I would it looks tuning already because it's a low poly model so keep that in mind maybe just for reference what I will do I will just create a round sphere so you can see how it would look on a smoother surface like this and I will add subdivisions one subdivision and I will assign to in shader three to three hit save and this is now what we get with the toon shader assigned okay so they both behave properly so currently no base so it's both black we just have the shadow from the shadow map right so I think the first thing what we want to do is explore the contour shader so we head over to edge and for this to work we need to enable contour right so we can either do it in the Global's or we can just head over to the edges thingy which is kind of the same effect but to illustrate let's just change it in the render Global's - gosh - claw contour sorry and then head over to the beauty and this is now what the beauty looks like it's both the same as you can see all right so currently we just see the outline which is the default because it's it's based on ID difference and because the car is one ID you get this contour for this so then you can see you have an angle threshold and this is kind of like based on the normal map on the normals it will create edges so whatever it detects a color difference it will create an edge so if I would do maybe 20 degrees you can see that it always takes a while to compute but this is Pickers it only generates the contour on the last final step so what I tend to do is I disable progressive refinement and I can be sure that's always updating immediately so the smaller you make the angle threshold the more edges it will find so let's go five five degrees and you can see we get more edges and because the sphere so smooth we I think we need to go a lot smaller for the spheres try one and now you can see something is going on on the sphere and you can see these facets of the police so this would be an angle threshold of one let's just change it to two and you can see we've got pretty thick lines and you can't control the max width in the Rena global so if I have the width on one here it won't be it won't get thicker than that but I like one because it's a nice pencil line which is cool and then you have options to to get a silhouette which is on default on if you have just a few objects all right so what you can do now is you can also create you can create additional edges to this so to do that you would use a mask color and what it's like how the edge detection works at what it's based on color differences so I could plug in any sort of noise pattern and it will based on that generate edges so we can just use a default texture let's just use AI noise and see if it produces you can see we get definitely some patterns right right here so if I change the scaled may as you point to it should get larger like this and you can see we get different patterns now just based on what the input is right so what I like to do is create maybe some some fractal breakup like we did before right so to do to do so what I did or what what you can do is just connect a flake shader for instance which would help you create these little flakes so under I think shader is it here it was here oh there's so many different options a eye flakes so I just plugged that in and you can see it definitely shows the flakes already also on the sphere on the top here so let's just try to do worldspace right yeah because then these two are the same and now let's increase the scale maybe two to one and now we should get larger flakes which is the case awesome and then the density to one so it's fully filled out with flakes and this is how you would get a flake shader on top of the edges as well which is an interesting effect it might not be really like a toon shader but you can see you can get these nice illustrative drawings just based on this simple thing here and then we can do these the base color for instance and we can set this up using a tone map as well so a tone map is based on on a light angle so to do so let's just introduce base color and head over either we can just stay here we can just move over to the beauty instead which is this guy and if we plug in a ramp in the tone map we can we get this effect immediately so let's see if it's actually working if we can see a difference here let's just try none for now just moving this guy over it's a bit slow because I'm running full res maybe I should just change your resolution a bit to be 50% so we have more speed on our end here okay so now it's on 50% so let's just see if we can actually see a difference here happening so we definitely see a difference there so if I just bring this one a bit closer at some point we should see it's switching over so this is now just because the key light or my main light is coming from the top this is what you get so if I would do a more side light light something something like this this should look way more different you can see now this is fully white on this edge and you can see it's working on the sphere as well so this is interesting so let's work with that so if I head over to the tone map you can see that the shadow side is gray right so whatever's on the left is on the shadow side so let's just move this guy over and just just add a few more colors to this whole thing so let's just try something red no it didn't confirm it just pause this quickly okay so now we can just set it up it's a bit faster now so let's just do red here and maybe something orange e something cyan and maybe something like didn't confirm again so let's try this again okay so shadow side is blue and then it should turn into orange and then let's just do yellow and then maybe white or just really hot that's something like this okay so let's unable to render again and see what we get so you can see on the sphere you can see the nice gradient happening and you can kind of see the effect on a car currently it's the interpolation is none so you get these step ei jiz right which is an attune shader effect for sure but you can also soften them out if you just add interval interpolation to to be linear and you can see now on the sphere this is to smooth fall-off on this and you can definitely just play around make this even larger and play around with these full of curves to get an interesting results let's just try this again with this guy over and now let's see okay okay so this would be the toon shader based on light direction so if I would throw off a copy of my viewport and drag in my directional light I'm not controlling the light so if i zoom in on the car like this I can just rotate my light angle and still render from this camera so now we should see if I enable progressive you should you can quickly see that the light angle changes the contour shader sorry the toon shader and you can definitely see it very clearly on the sphere so I kind of let's say I kind of like this maybe a bit some nice colors here and this is pretty cool you can see you Scylla she'll go from the sphere on the car I just moved it over and this would be my toon shader for the beauty pass and then you have the edges which are like these currently and the Bliss is now currently my beauty because I can show you the problem is the edges alpha channel on the contour mode is just like this and combine it just does not really add them up so this is why there's like this this weird look and this is all just because I have a gray background so if this would be black you should be fine to do that and we can leave it on black it I just thought it's easier to see what's going on if it's like a little greyish so let's change it back to 100% just to get nicer lines and progressive off and this is now this is what we get so this would be the toon shader with those line patterns right on top let's just close this guy let's see what else is in the shader which I can talk about so you can have different things in the mass to generate edges which is nice you can have separate control of opacity you can have a different tone map which is for the etch itself you can have different colors in there and please if you don't understand all these options they are all documented right here there's lots of information read through them and it's very informative so I'll be just brushing up on the basics I guess so I will be heading over to the head now let's just do that and your pains and head frame this guy so this is the default render other default head for the most of my skin renders and I think I will just assign it to Dan shader right now hey I tuned and framed this guy and render this okay so this is what he looks like what's the same lighting for the car which is okay with the top-down light and currently we don't have tone maps on it so it's pretty standard okay so heading over to the toon shader what I like to do first is create this rim light and maybe a silhouette something so I'm just a sailing the edge which so we don't it joke it does not try to detect edges and so let's create first let's create the rim light so and for that just to sail the base and that's changes to progressive on and I will be creating a new light which will be the room light so create lights directional light drag this in here frame on the head not sure why this never really really works so good anyways let's I'm not sure it sometimes it's just buggy these lights where is it now there okay I'm just snapping it on the surface now okay so a rim light is mostly from the back so what I'd be trying to do now is if I had lights think we can't control it and is there a way to just have single lights use all lights you selected lights okay so if I look through the camera just here I can just do this kind of thing which is the room light so I kind of have the light direction and it's just a sable lighting again my default lighting so how the shader works it needs a path to the rim lights so in the rim lighting you get this light slot and what you can do just middle Mouse drag the directional light on here and it will populate the path for you and this is more or less all you got to do and you well you would also need to provide a color but for now let's just render this should be no much different and you can actually hide the light if you don't want to affect the diffuse rights or the base color so I'm just hiding this and heading back over to the head I will be adding a color for the room light so a default color is not really that helpful because it will tinted uniformly but what I will be doing now is creating a ramp connecting a ramp to that and then it's kind of the same thing as before you would need to specify the full of based on the ramp so for now just disable the ramp and you can see now what we get so the more to the right the more we come to the edge and we get the nice Remy effect so if I would change it to linear and move this guy over you can see that we get this nice remnant effect or fall off if you want to go in that direction you can easily just do that and obviously you can add colors so let's say I have a Sian color there and then we get something more warmer like this and this would be now well it looks it looks almost like alright essence but let's so let's just keep it simple just put the blue to leave hurry to the far edge and then just do that and this would be now my really soft room light and you can still control it in the shader a bit more so you can actually change the width of it a bit here so you can just control it easily more easily there and let's go to the base so the base is our base shader is currently black so it doesn't have any diffuse but if you have a texture you can just pipe in the texture here and you get a nice look there for sure you can do that so this is now my base enabled and I can just have a base color something like this but I can also just add a tone map because this is now really soft shaded and I use a tome up you can get the nice too and look so just change it more to none again so it's we get these harsh edges and then you can already see what's going on here so everything which is white will get the base color right which is this color which is this color there and the black is the shadows so I could now just create the same color and it should be pretty oh I think I actually got multiplied these colors to get to check out a shadow so this would be now a interesting shader because it's tuplet and you can see what's going on because we get the shadow there so you can now have different intensities of this and you can very easily just create this imitation of a shadow line or something getting darker right and this would be a toon shader with a rim light currently we don't have any edges what else can we do we can use specularity to create more interesting patterns like let's see if I bring up the roughness a bit we can see that you get something here and you can also use that for edge detection as well but you can also tone map this I think I haven't tried this myself yet but will can just see what what this will bring us so if I put this to none you can see now that we get these these reflection lines which are pretty interesting actually and I think this is the base color as well so if I go back whatever is in here would be my pure reflection which is now just added on top no because the weight is so low you can see what's happening and I think it has indirect as well in the rect spec so if this would be off I don't think we would see this there we go yeah so but I think white is a better respect color maybe not as intense so maybe point two would be working better and because it's energy conserving the whole thing change so if a thing is fully specular it won't have any base color so this is what energy conserving is right okay so what else can we do with this guy so I think we should jump over to the edges so if I enable edge we currently don't see any edges because I don't think oh maybe contour is actually on I'm not so sure if it's on it is still on okay so it's not detecting any edges because the angle threshold might be too high so maybe let's go down to 20 and see if we get any edges so we can see there's something appearing on on the eyes the problem is because again it only displays on the last step we will it will take a while to display so I'm just disabling the progressive refinement and I'm just rendering the head for now so let's just try an angle maybe of three and see what we get and now you can see we get deaf definitely some patterns here what we should do now is I guess because it's it's such a high dense geometry we can use a different wireframe so let's just try to use a mask color instead and for this let's just use utility shader which comes with Arnold which is a eye utility and the default mode looks a bit strange but you've got different modes in here so let's just use flat and then we will use some color modes so what you can do here is you can actually use holding and wireframe and you should get a contour shader based on that right so this is actually interesting because it has a thickness to it and then you have different mode modes like afloat great is pretty interesting it's it's creating like a XY coordinate on the geometry so you can definitely play around with this stuff you can see you get these nice patterns there what else can we do we can use reflection lines which are interesting let's see if this works so yeah as all these fancy things you can do and I'm pretty sure you can get a pretty interesting results just using these kind of things what else do I want to show is um you can try to what was it oh yeah what I did as well was connecting a ramp in here and then in the ramp you can do cell things as well so you can actually blend different modes together so that's also interesting so if you would use a ramp you can actually pretty simple just plug in a different mode let's say for the bottom we just plug in here I'm just pausing the render for now so at the bottom you can for instance use the flakes which I did before so let's try to find them AI flakes at the bottom let's go back and put something and here and here and then the last one maybe a checkerboard I haven't tried that we'll see what that brings us so it's just start rendering again so now you can see at the top we get the checkerboard and at the bottom we get the flakes and it's all driven by the ramp right so if I just oops I just want to frame this a bit nicer like this and head back over here and maybe just for now just to 50% so we get faster feedback oops I hate when this is on okay all right so this is now what it's currently looking like but it's it's not perfect because you can see its way to dance at the bottom so let's just adjust these things a bit so the scale is too small so maybe just try 1.5 for the flakes at the bottom and you see what we get this looks pretty interesting especially with these edges inside of that and then you can play around with the density you maybe try point 8 to get a bit more and try the randomize so these are things you can just play around with to get interesting results and for the top you can see the checkerboard which is working also pretty good you can just change the scale so you would change a place to do you know maybe just try 25 to get something like this right and then there's so many things you can play around with you can also just go back to the noise and add some distortion on top which should also just break up the whole thing a bit let's see if it's actually doing yeah so it's you can see that we get flakes on the top now we get these nice little lines everywhere so it's it's definitely something to play around with and there are so many possibilities especially if you also blend in textures it can get very interesting so this is almost like the Spider Man that's it on his face or something and again it split up in beauty and edges so the edges are Vickers it's it's like this it's just an alpha map one cool thing which I want to show you before I finish off this video you can actually use this to blend different modes together and what I mean by that is you can actually use occlusion to bake inclusion on top so what I did before is I can just create an occlusion node I that's the one and delete this guy and before we go into the shading engine we just create an AI multiply node which just multiplies two outputs together so this and this and we connect them to the surface shader and heading over here we should see that we get some occlusion you can see it's getting dark at the bottom and in the eyes you get you can see more shadowing happening so let's try a size of 30 so it's not including everything it's only around the eyes and you can see the difference if I would change the justice to disable it quickly you can see that the bottom is getting a lot darker and around the eyes and ears so back to 30 you can definitely see a difference there now you can do the same thing with all the other nodes as well so if you want to see a slightly a wireframe on top you can just create an AI utility node and multiply this one on top as well so just AI multiplied connect these guys up like this change the utility mode to be flat and let's try overlay more poly wire and see what we get and you can see it's just multiplied on top and obviously if you want to change the control or the intensity of the wireframe it's easy to do with just create an AI arrange node connected in between the wireframe and the output and change the out min to maybe 0.5 and now we should see a lighter wireframe being on top of there so we can go even further to something like this and this should summarize or sum up most of the things you can do with AI too and obviously if you check the documentation there are very a lot of different images which should inspire you to do interesting things and obviously read through the documentation to get more detailed information about these things but I just wanted to give you a quick jumpstart on how to set things up especially using edge detect and the contour render filter yeah so thank you guys for tuning in and be sure to check out my other social media sites and hook me up there and also again the source files for this the whole scene I will save this guy now and whatever this scene file will be uploaded to my patreon site we'll have full access to the scene file and the render outputs so thank you guys for tuning in and enjoy your weekend and happy rendering

Channel: Arvid Schneider

Views: 40,938

Keywords: 3D, Tutorial, Maya, Learning, Arvid, Schneider, training, mtoa, render, advanced, solidangle, autodesk, learning, toonshader, sktetch, arnold toon, aitoon, arnold, arnold 5.1

Id: lbbcwVOkgi8

Length: 36min 56sec (2216 seconds)

Published: Sat May 05 2018