Sketch & Toon Lines In Cinema 4D R19

good morning good afternoon good evening wherever you are today's video is going to be cinemas sketch and tune system the toolset for making basically NPR renders non photorealistic renderings let's go shall we now again she's not going to be absolutely everything this is gonna be most of the important things that you tend to need I might do a more advanced video on sketch another day anyway let's jump into show down here in your material area if you click on and create and I'm just going to move this up otherwise we're gonna lose our window here so let's go to create and down to shader and then have a look in amongst all this frankly trash you will find this one little Golden Nugget called sketch material at one of these okay let's put this back okay here's your sketch material open this up and you'll get naturally your material settings now there's a lot of stuff in here there's a lot of options a lot of check boxes a lot of gadgets I'll save you a bit of time up front we don't need most of this to do most things in sketch these do have uses and as I say I may do a more advanced video at some point but to be brutally honest most of the stuff you're not going to need now I'm a big fan of just making materials up from scratch as you need but I will say with a sketch system just go to your main page and load a preset I don't want to try and shortchange you but most base styles that you're probably going to be after are pretty much in this list now the thumbnails they're not that useful unfortunately all just look kind of similar you don't really see much in there and EE unfortunately the names of these are all largely cut off so we have all these tech presets where you can't really see much evidence between them you just have to hover your mouse over it look at the full name and make your judgment based on that anyway so there's a bunch of presets but let's have a look at the things that we will change in this material do keep in mind sketch is only partially a material system a lot of the setting direction going to be looking at are a series of tags render settings and other materials so going down this list we're gonna skip over strokes and adjustment just because they're a bit advanced for now same thing with this store to be honest let's just go with color so in your color settings again it's a little bit too straightforward really pick a color for your line if I just throw an object in here or - let's go for a cube and maybe a tourists are over there first things first by the way I know this is a material but don't drag it onto your objects you can but that will break everything I'm going to try and tell you when we added our sketch material it created not just this material which is being used but if you have a look in your render settings we do also actually have a sketch and tune section in our render settings now and just to sort of jump head and cut a long story short this material is already applied to everything the general idea with sketch is that once you add a sketch style you very very likely just want that style apply to absolutely everything in your scene and that's what it does so when we hit render here's our sketch so this line style is already being applied to absolutely everything so we can adjust the style now as I say the color is you know it's blending of blindingly obvious just pick a color hit render and lo and behold that's what you get again there are a few settings down here another video perhaps jumping down we have thickness this is going to be how thick you would like your line style to be measured in pixels so default is whoo which literally means it's going to be two pixels thick give or take a bit of anti-aliasing naturally choose a value which suits your rendering and then underneath we have opacity how strong how see-through how transparent should these lines be if I reduce it down to anything other than 100% you'll notice that the lines are now a little bit see-through and we can see what's underneath this is particularly good for any styles where it's like marker pens watercolours something where you would traditionally start to see something below the surface once you've drawn the line and for the time being that's all I'm actually going to show you down this list pick a color choose a thickness and tweak the opacity but do just simply start off with one of these presets because they do more or less have every style probably after now that seems like it would be quite a short lesson if this is all I need to tell you well no let's let's close this down we just turn my opacity back up for a moment and turn the thickness back down so it's not quite so thick okay so the place where you actually changed most settings for your sketch system is in your render settings so if we open these up go and have a look at the sketch and tune section and in here what you'll find so there's nothing much on the main page so we'll skip over that but on lines what we essentially have in here is a series of checkboxes this is asking us where should the lines appear under what circumstances should these lines be drawn so by default we have folds creases and borders in other words you're going to get lines around the outside border of an object and whenever cinema detects a fold or a crease which really is just sort of a a peak or a trough so if there's enough of a crease on the surface as you would get for example on this cube over here you will get an extra line cinema sees that these are effectively folds within a surface if I turn a folds and let's go at the wrong way around 50-50 chance here wrong way around creases then maybe creases there we go so depending on whether it considers it to be a fold or a crease you will lose the lines from those now it's not so much that you'd really want to turn these off you do almost always want these three it's more that you're going to want to turn on some of the others for example let's say I have two cubes and they overlap like this when I render this it looks okay but you would maybe consider that there are some missing lines but from here to here for example I think you know what there should be a line there where these two things overlap so usually one of the first things you'll want to turn on when using the sketch system is some form of intersections intersections are basically overlapping surfaces just one ton bit of advice by the way if you don't see all of these settings if you're looking at this thinking hmm I don't have as many choices as he does first of all you probably using an older version the software something like version 15 or 16 maybe maybe older if you would like all of these settings jump back to your main page and you'll notice there's an extra setting in here called what's a cool network control level something along those lines it'll give you three choices of beginner intermediate and advanced just bump it up to advanced and you'll get all the settings anyway so yeah so if I want to get these missing lines here these would be intersections so if I turn on intersections this doesn't unfortunately fix it because whenever you turn one of these settings on you'll get another set of settings underneath so sure I've enabled the intersections option but I do have to choose which intersections and by default it's only going to draw a line when the object touches itself what does that really mean imagine you had a character that character might be one single mesh and if for example the fingertips on his hand touched themselves that would be a self intersecting object where the mesh touches itself we don't have that we have two completely separate objects so the one which sort of just uniformly generally works for most projects is in here set it to be project wide and again if you do have an older version of cinema your project wide setting might be called scene wide setting either way choose this setting and cinema will now check the entire project for any intersections move this over here and when I render there we go we now have this sort of missing overlapping intersection line so that's quite useful want to turn on a lot of the time um others you may want to consider would be something like edges if I lose these cubes and I throw in a torus okay normally when I hit render we just get the outlines and that's it but if I go for edges this is effectively a full wireframe render of the shape so if you are trying to get some sort of 3d grids computer graphics sort of look to your to your renderings turning on edge mode can get you quite a long way let's see what else did you do another one would be for example particle and spline mode these would allow you to draw spline and normally splines don't rend it but if you're using sketch and you enable the spline mode well now they do but of course watch out for this lots of things in cinema will be splines you'll have spline objects in your extrudes in your lofts all sorts of places maybe some animation paths they would all suddenly start to render which could naturally be a bit of a problem so let me just show you how you get around that little issue now remember back at the start I told you don't apply this material to any objects well this is one of those cases where maybe you do want to apply the material to an object if my render settings don't have the spline option turned on because this this is a bit of a damaging bad thing to turn on for your full render because every spline gets drawn the question is how do you render the spline well you apply that sketch material to the spline object and if you look just the right when I drop this on here we now have this brown sketch style tag and to be honest all of these settings you see down here are a complete duplication of your render settings so this is sort of a project wide sketch style setting and if you apply to an object's well you then have the exact same things per object one by one and you will notice because I dropped this thing onto a spline object cinema has intelligently decided hey I should probably render splines and there we go we can now actually see them this also allows you to override a style so perhaps you have a scene where everything is going to be drawn with one style maybe a sort of a Western 1960s comic book pop art style and in walks a Japanese character and perhaps you want that Japanese character to have some sort of Japanese calligraphy brush I have one in here somewhere I really wish we could just see the names more easily there we go so maybe we could use this calligraphy pen to show the Japanese character or maybe we could go for a sort of a technical line diagram for showing some robotic character walking in so you can have more than one style applied to different objects within the same scene which is nice okay let's go back into a render settings okay so that more or less covers the most useful settings up here there again there are absolutely others which have the use is but I don't want to have the longest video in the world so I'm gonna skip over those which aren't quite so useful what I'm gonna look at next is this rather unassuming bit in the middle default visible and default hidden now the first one it's not so much that we want to change it but I need to tell you what it is so that we know what the next one does default visible sketch met this sketch map bit is this material if I were to rename this sketch material let's just call its viz because it's visible those are wondering the same thing basically if you clear this out this will stop cinemas sketch system from applying itself to absolutely everything in your scene so if you do want a normal full photorealistic render with lights and shadows and reflections but you just want one or two cartoon characters maybe doing a new sequel to Who Framed Roger Rabbit that would allow you to do this just snip over here in this little teeny tiny pulldown box just choose clip and you can now just start applying each sketch material to objects one by one but it's not so much that we want that we want to do this what I want to show you is this next option default hidden this allows you to apply a sketch style to everything that you can't see and this is a lot more useful than it initially sounds so let me go back to having maybe just a couple of cubes one two and they're overlapping good and oh by the way just in terms of material you can still apply normal materials to things so if you don't want these things to be dark gray just make a normal regular standard material and just apply it you can have both at the same time this is how you can still color and texture your cartoon surfaces anyway I have this plain black thick sketch material I'm gonna add a second one creates shader and it's just gone off the edge of the screen but trust me I'm just selecting sketch material down here at the bottom like we did the first time so here's my second sketch material and I'll just call this sketch number two this is hidden things what I'm gonna do with this is open it up go to my presets and scroll down in amongst these tech presets these are for doing technical line diagrams so straight lines dotted lines double lines - - all sorts of a sort of construction diagram type things so if I have a look through here where we've gone to do tech 0.35 mil dashed line okay that's what I'm after so when I add it you can just about see there me make it a bit larger that didn't help thank you this is a series of little dots and dashes running along the length of this line what we're going to do is go to our end settings and where we have this default hidden section we're going to drag and drop this new dotted line into that section and watch this the cool thing is any part of the model which I can't see because it's hidden we now get this this is one of the coolest things about sketch it's great for diagrams building diagrams if you're trying to make some sort of IKEA construction manual or Lego construction manual or some technical some technical documentation for something this is absolutely brilliantly useful that will do for these lines so the system have shown you so far this really only concerns itself with creating these lines around the objects it doesn't really have anything to do with how everything gets shaded that dude to do to do to do to do over here that is the shading page of your sketch render settings now this whole window is broadly split into two parts have a look carefully do you see this line running across here - little bit hard to see but there's this horizontal barrier between these two sections everything above this line deals with the background in your project everything below the line deals with the actual objects themselves so first of all if you're wondering why the background suddenly turned white when we started using the sketch system it's because the background is set to use a solid color and that color is surprise-surprise white feel free to throw in a different color if you would prefer maybe a nice bit of light blue there we go I think I've just recreated Sketchup or rather than using a solid color you could throw in some sort of texture so if you're trying to sort of make this all look like it's pencil sketches rendered onto a piece of rough paper load in your paper texture into these slots and it will now put that image behind everything we bring the honest this is really no different from you creating a background objects making a material and applying it so don't expect it's gonna be particularly any different in any way it's just a quick way to change it because if you're doing sketch it's probably something you are doing if you want on the other hand cinema to just stop around with the background just turn it off and that will just leave the background and it's now back up to you again to choose what happens to your background and it's very similar for the colouring of objects as well so let's just take a quick look so by default we are quantizing our colors now if you've never really come across this term before what it means let's throw in a sphere make it white and raise it up okay what this means I'm just made a sphere a bit brighter okay is you're gonna get oops I seem to have left edge mode turned on did I yes I did okay what we'll get is this stepped banding this sort of a gradient that certainly steps from white through gray and then eventually down the edges it'll it'll turn to black especially if we pop a light source in here leave a dark area there we go now okay fine I get why it does it this is sort of known as traditionally a cel-shaded look maybe you want it um but maybe you don't so this quantizing this is how many different shades it will split it into and it's not so much that you'd really want to change this too much it's more that maybe you just don't want this style at all to begin with so let's have a look at the other choices and by other choices I mean the other choice quantize is this step shading but the other choice you've got is a gradient now when you hit render in here again it's just gonna look worse but don't worry what we've now got underneath is this gradient gadget which allows us to choose what sort of colors what sort of shades the whole system should be using so you can adjust these gradient knots up and down to choose how much of each bit of shading we get but it's actually more that you might want to change the style of gradient when you first turn it on it'll probably look like this if you hit this teeny tiny little black triangle you can unfold it and see a few more settings and once you've done this you now get access to the interpolation options if we turn this on and it doesn't matter too much which of these we choose they're all very very very similar so just go for something like smooth and not or cubic knots see there there's really not a great deal between them so don't worry too much about which one you pick and I'm gonna call up cinemas render region because I want to quickly be able to see what effect this has so in the middle of a render button come down to interactive render region I can now draw this around move that out there okay so this is going to give me a good idea about what my final image is actually gonna look like and so long as you put some more interesting knots in here you actually get some quite nice effects so we won't have quite as much white area let's turn that down a bit and I'm gonna say look I want it to shade down to this gray quite quickly and I'll put another one here because I want it to maintain that gray for a while then I want it to suddenly jump down to a darker shade and then keep that darker shade all the way down just until it ends up as black so you can start to put these nice smooth transitions from one shade to the next by putting a couple of these knots quite close to each other and you can just have a nice gradient there by just leaving a nice smooth gradient within the gradient gadget itself okay so that's that's one of your other choices failing that's if neither of these are what you're after just turn the system off if you go to the previous setting so this is saying look use this shading mode if you're not a fan of either of these things just go to shading mode and say look either copy what the background is doing which will basically just give you purely the lines quite useful thing actually or just turn the whole system off stop it stop messing around with the lighting just let me take a normal material put in whatever colors and textures I like this nice old lady wallpaper and then you can just start throwing on whatever textures and images you prefer so that's more or less your shading system pick something for the backgrounds pick something for the objects or if the whole thing is just annoying you and you want you won't control back yourself just turn the object shading system off completely okay now as far as this area of sketch goes there's just a couple of last bits and pieces to mention one of them is the render resolution there there is in my humble opinion bit of an oversight when it comes to cinemas to get system then which is getting you seen here because lord knows how many different buttons have pressed right let's say I've got some of this some of that and one of these and I've created a sketch material so again create shader slightly off the screen sketch material and that now applies the sketch material to everything fine but let's say I've decided the thickness of this should be perhaps five pixels thick so let's give it a test render okay good fine this will bite you in the ass or if you American the ass I've set the thickness of my lines to be five pixels but the problem is the thickness of my lines will always be five pixels you might think what what that's that's fine I want them to be five or some with that no you don't one thing we do in 3d a lot is test renders hundreds thousands of test renders we do small resolution test renders we do huge print resolution renders we do HDTV renders within a project even though you might know what size you want it to be right at the very start you will be doing small tests to save yourself time and the problem is sketches thickness option doesn't take this into account so let's say my project ultimately is going to be two thousand by 1000 pixels a nice good resolution widescreen image okay and I'm working away lalala front view top view I do a small test render hit render and here see what we get okay there's my image I would expect that when I do my full resolution render it would simply be a larger version of this it won't be what happens when I do my final render if some of the tests I was doing earlier just close those down when I when I do my full resolution render I get this these lines are noticeably thinner than these lines are that's because if i zoom this thing up to normal 100% size the lines are gonna be 5 pixels thick here and the lines are going to be 5 pixels thick here but relatively the larger picture makes them look thin so my small test renders won't look like the final image which is a problem you can get around this you've just got to remember to actually change the setting in your render settings so ideally this is actually one of the first things you should do if you're using sketch because if you leave it to the very end and you get everything looking perfect then you do your final output you're gonna get annoyed anyway sketch in tune go to your render page and there is a setting just literally called resolution independent seeing as everything else in this entire piece of software is resolution independent probably would have been a good idea if this were turned on anyway let's fix it turn it on we're gonna change this because what we want to do is set a final destination let's say the final intended thing for this is going to be a sort of 1920 by 1080 video set the base width to whatever you think your final resolution is gonna be and then that's it you just leave it my 5 pixel thick line will be 5 pixels if I render this resolution if further down the line I decide maybe me and my client decide hey let's do this in 4k well when you do the 4k render because it's 5 pixels thick at this resolution when I do the 4k which is twice as big it will be 10 pixels thick so you don't have you don't ever have to come in here and change it just choose what you think you're going to be working to and then simply leave the setting forever never ever change this once you've sort of set it up otherwise all your lines will suddenly get thicker or thinner which by the way you could use this as a Global Way to change the thickness or the thinness if you wanted although to be honest that's what the setting above it does anyway okay so that's the render settings there is just one last little thing I think I will show you just before we finish this first part of video and that is the quick simple little animation system just just to say by the way there will be more to this I might split this into two videos one where we cover the lines which is this and another one where we cover the more advanced shading systems of the sketch the sketch system anyway the last thing I want to show you just for now let's open up our material is just this little animate page at the bottom this is a quick simple way that you can draw the lines as an animation within your project so all you got to do I submit its larger let's throw this up here right so if I enable this option called draw sounds like a cowboy Western meeting at noon draw anyway the default behavior for this is that cinema will draw each line one by one from the start to the end of the project so my project is 90 frames long if I were to render out the entire animation by going to outputs let's get a small sensible size image maybe 800 by 500 and I tell it to output all of the frames but I don't really particularly want to save it so I'll just turn it off and now right when I hit render it'll complain that I'm not saving but I don't really care and away we go oops I've left that resolution independent setting turned on haven't I let's just disable that nope there's a thickness for the lines ooh three pixels that will do okay let's try that one again shall we so here we go so a hundred percent zooms got a right size as this renders you can actually see all of these lines being drawn one by one if I press play you can now see as an animation all these lines being drawn to do piece by piece and yeah there they go quite a nice animation but I don't really get any choice over how long this process takes or how fast it goes you do have one or two things you can change in a sketch material underneath the animate section basically the draw speed the default behavior is that cinema draws this between the start of the animation or frame zero here and it finishes it just where wherever the animation ends so it's gonna take the full 90 frames if you'd like a bit more control go for completion mode instead completion simply gives you a percentage so you get to choose how complete the drawing is so you can keyframe this I'll say look start the animation at frame ten and make it zero percent complete in other words there will be no lines hit record and then maybe after 40 frames I would like the drawing to be absolutely complete and finished so set the completion up to 100% hit record there we go my draw will now take place between these two specified points rather than just arbitrarily however long my project lasts if I hit render tell it to continue we'll get a few frames of absolutely nothing a few frames of drawing the the line system and then for the rest of the animation the drawing will be complete so when I hit play I'll just turn off this ping pong mode it will play draws the lines finishes so you get to choose how how long it takes to do the completion mode is generally the most straightforward one to work with the only other little bit is the that do you want cinema to draw each individual little line one after the other that's our default behavior or do you want to just draw everything simultaneously as if you've got the server multi-armed God's drawing every single part of the picture all simultaneously that would be all strokes simultaneously for the option right okay so I think for this first part of a sketch video I think I'll end it there keep an eye out for part two if you're watching these videos as they come out it might be a little while before it comes out but I'll let you know when it is if you're watching these videos many years after I've made them well it's probably already done by now hopefully so anyway this is mushroom a 3d fluff until the next time cheers for now you

Channel: 3DFluff

Views: 29,634

Keywords: cinema 4d, c4d, maxon, 3d fluff, gsg, greyscale gorilla, cineversity, digital meat, nose man, mash, tutorial, training, guide, lesson, how to, mograph, matthew oneill, cartoon, lines, npr, sketch, toon, s&t, sketch and toon, cel, cel shader, paint, ink, pencil, sketchup

Id: eLG3cqMgweE

Length: 34min 12sec (2052 seconds)

Published: Thu May 31 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/3dfluff]

New 35 minute Lines generation tutorial is ready. Shading video will be next week.

[u/polarDiarrhea]

hey man! did not know you're on reddit. really love your tuts! keep the great work!