Spider-verse Style / Comic Shader in Blender

in this tutorial I'm going to be showing you how to make this comic Shadows node right here this is heavily based off of into the spider-verse the sort of way they shade things in that movie is really great it's really highly stylized and I love the way it looks and we are going to be mimicking that quite a lot so in that movie there's a number of different ways you can see the characters are shaded a lot of them are shaded like this using sort of dashed lines but a few of the other ones sort of to show there from different universes I use dots so that's the um Spider-Man Noir uses dots and also some of them use cross hatches like this so this allows us to do all of that and also it is going to allow us to use textures so if we plug this in here you can see it's a little bit weird takes a bit of fiddling on the color ramp when you start using textures but it works so I'm going to show you how to do that so let's go ahead and remove our texture here and add in a new one oh and by the way if you're wondering where I got this head from I didn't make it this is one of the just base meshes that you can download from the blender website it's like one of the first things listed on the demo files you can I'll have that uh have that linked Down Below in the description so if you want to follow along on this but you can just do it on anything you could add in a sphere a cube Suzanne anything at all I just like this because you get to see a lot of the The Contours on the face so all of this begins with a basic cell shading model so we're going to take our principal bsdf here just draw off the bsdf output and look for a Shader to RGB node plug that into a color ramp this is already standard stuff there's a lot of videos talking about this I've got another one as well and you might not have noticed a difference if you're new to this concept but essentially what this is doing is it's it allows us to have more control over the the Shadows so we can like move this among a whole other things but in simple it just gives us more control over the Shadows this only works in Eevee if we were to change to Cycles Cycles doesn't have a clue what's going on so this this only works with Evie but as you can see there we can bring these like really close together and if we do that then it's just this hard Edge where all of the Shadows are which is exactly what we need for our setup for our sort of dashed lines and all of that so I'm going to switch back to linear and just leave it like that for now so the one I'm going to be making first is going to be the dots example of like the little little dots all over the face because I it's my favorite one I like the way that looks so a lot of people will tell you to use like a diffused bsdf here but for what we're doing the principal bsdf essentially perfect because we're going to be using image textures later on down the line so like not just these ones here because these are also technically image textures so I'm going to look up for a voronoi texture and take the distance output and plug that in and you'll see we start getting some funky some sort of funky shapes here so if we just look directly on from above we can see this I'm going to bring up the scale a bit so you can see it a bit more obviously looking kind of like cells like in biology and all that I I don't know how best to explain them like the cell walls I didn't do well at biology so um yeah I like the the professionals talk about that so we're going to turn down the randomness so it's all just neat squares here and what we need to do is turn these into just hard little dots so you can sort of see in the middle here it's darkest in the centers and then lightest on the outside so if we grab another color amp here I'm just going to duplicate this one and do that if we change this to constant and then bring this down you'll start to see all of the little dots now this has to be done on distance if you use color it doesn't actually work you can see it's all just random squares all over the all over the face that's good for other circumstances but not for what we want we're going to be using this there we go so now that we have this we need to map this slightly differently because at the moment it's just projecting dots on there as an image texture like as it would because we are using one so what we're going to do is we are going to hit Ctrl t on the back of this if you have the node Wrangler add-on now I'll add a mapping node and what we're going to do is rather than using the generated UVS for the object here we are instead going to use the camera UVS and that will follow our camera all the way around so as we turn the body around these the dots stay in the same place they do not move which is exactly what we need now we are going to turn up the scale a little bit just to get this a little bit a little bit better there we go and the last thing that we're going to do is change this from 3D to 2D because that will then just give us this plain array of dots all over the face just perfect sync so if we do it on 3D you can see it kind of starts to get like stretched around the the outside of the head which may be what you want this could actually be pretty cool for like some weird sort of stylized stuff because as you can see as you start to zoom out here it's uh it gets this weird kind of effect but for the sort of style that we're mimicking we're just going to set this to 2D and get this blank canvas of dots all across the all across our mesh there so now that we have this set up here we essentially need to make it so that it only affects the Shadows it only appears in the um the sort of like blending of the the light and the dark and the way we are going to do that is by influencing our two color ramps here so the first thing we're going to do is affect this one here so rather than having the full range of Shadows here we're going to bring these closer together so as you can see when I bring this up we're starting to get just straight black here and then if we bring this down the lights will get um lighter I don't know what it um it just brings it closer as I demonstrated before but you'll be noticing that this isn't changing at all the um the the Dots here that's because we need to make this one lighter so this is just as contrasty as it can get at the moment and we need to to lighten this so if you start to bring it up you can see where the light is here will start to fade why is it disappearing there we go so if we bring this up to now in the settings before I had this on 0.5 that was sort of The Sweet Spot I found in terms of uh sort of where I I like the sort of the size of the the the gradient the size of the Shadow but you can it doesn't have to be 0.5 you can make this more or less if you want that but I just liked the size of 0.5 and also I like round numbers there we go so now that we have our little setup here all that's left to do is to group all of these together I'm going to hit Ctrl J and make a nice little group here just like that and then I'm going to hit Ctrl G this will put it into its own group there and we just have this lovely little node group exactly as we need so if we take a color ample node now and plug this in here we can start playing around with the colors so if I make this say you can go as weird and wonderful as you want you can have a green and a pink Shader there perfect that's exactly what we need but there's still a whole lot of functionality that we're missing this is only just one thing at the moment so we're going to go back into our group here and start adding a bit more to it so first off to remember that this is the dash group I'm going to press n to bring up this side panel here and under the outputs if you just double click on that you can rename this to whatever you want so I'm going to name this dot shading there we go so now when we leave here we can see we've got dot shading I'm also going to name this the comic and I already named the other one Comics uh we'll we'll name it the the spider node there we go so fun cool Okay so we've got this we can essentially just duplicate this entire setup and make it for the other ones so the easiest one to turn it into first will be the dashes so if we just grab our entire group here shift d moving down oh no I need to highlight it all up that bit shift e move it down there we go and we are just going to delete our voronoi texture take the vector look for a wave a wave texture here and plug that in so now if we go ahead and plug this into our output and plug that in there so we can see what we're doing we have this which is basically exactly what we need except I don't like the fact that it's just perfectly flat coming down so I'm going to rotate it by 50 degrees and that will sort of make a nice little blend here I'm also going to change the colors because that's kinda intense it's not exactly the prettiest thing in the world I'm going to make that blue and orange complementary colors that's that's more Brown than Orange let's let's do that bring the value up a bit there we go it's as I said you can make whatever color you want you can do whatever you want so there we go so you can get a couple more interesting effects with this so this is still being straight projected from our camera here as we move around you can see the lines stay in the same place but you can fiddle around to get some different results personally I just leave it like this because I like the way that that looks but if you change it to rings that gives a completely different effect here you can change the X and Y and Z orientation you can just play around with all that get some different effects as I said I like the just standard sort of hashed lines here and then you can affect the scale here so you can make it bigger and the lines get smaller you can set it to one and just have really big lines here if you want I'm gonna leave it on seven for now because we will be plugging these into the group input after to add a little bit more customization to it so the last one we're going to do is create the hashed lines so as you might have guessed already we are going to select all of this because if it ain't broke don't fix it I'm going to come down here and just duplicate this setup again let's bring this down to here we are going to rotate this by 90 degrees so we're going to set this to 140 we're going to need to move these back a little bit just to get a bit more room and we're going to get a mix RGB node and plug it in to the middle here so when we do that nothing's going to happen because we aren't doing this there we go if we do that we now start getting some hashed lines again Ctrl shift click on that just to get the the temporary viewer as you can see here and there you have it you have some hatched lines perfect exactly what we need now I'm going to change the temporary viewer to oh no we can't change the temporary View getting ahead of myself trying to make a shortcut when you can't do it don't do that dashed line and then we'll rename the middle too just simple line Lanny what line I wanted cool so if we plug this back in we now have complete control over whether we have sort of dashed lines cross hatching or if we have regular lines or dots which is perfect I'm also going to rotate the dots around because I like the sort of Randomness because when it's set perfectly to zero it's a bit distracting seeing it in perfect lines here whereas if you set it to something like 50 your eye can't really follow it exactly it's like even still if you set it to 45 you still have horizontal lines here there's just like inset a little bit so if you set it to 50 it's a little bit less noticeable so I'm going to set it to that now we're just going to take our scale outputs here and plug all of these in like so it just takes a moment and there we go perfect so now we have our scale input here so we can make it bigger or smaller simply from the node editor which is perfect exactly what we need so what are we going to do next we need to apply some image textures which is why I left the principled bsdf in with principle bsdf we have control over the normals the metallic the roughness we have all of that just straight at our fingertips whereas if you use the diffuse Shader if I get it up if you don't know what I'm on about say you're new you only have roughness and that's not really going to do all too much so which one are using at the moment the dots so that's the top one so if we go ahead and change the roughness here you will see not much happens but the bottom you can see that bottom bit there right back here if you missed it so that's a change when you do that so if you set it sort of around here the light which is currently positioned by here we'll start doing that so if we move it around you can see that that will start to to follow it and what's another cool feature about it is you have control over the metallicness but metallic I don't know what the you you have control over the metallic node so you can turn that on and it makes it slightly more like well metally and you can sort of get that feel so it kind of it's it's hard to explain how I don't know why like I don't know what makes something look metally because it doesn't it's not exactly shiny like looking at this but it you just sort of like you get that feeling you know so if you turn it down like all the way and you wanted to make it a mirror you can also do that there which is weird looks kind of cool so if you're also using a hdri you will get the environmental Reflections around it so if we turn that on which one are we using at the moment the forest one this one's a little bit easier to see so if you turn the roughness down and put it all the way up to metallic you can see in the background we have our buildings so that's another layer to the uh to the Shader that's why we're using the principal bsdf so if we plug in what most of the image textures use which is the roughness value here and the normal value because a lot of image textures come with normal data to sort of like make the bumps which is also very important for this Shader because that will then start projecting these dots into the bumps so if we just plug those in for all of our principal bsdfs here we will get all of that lovely juicy detail just detail ever been described as juicy I I have no idea and then another one if you want to you don't have to you can take the metallic a lot of images textures come with the metallic data so we're gonna do that because as I said before we actually get the uh we do see the benefit from that now you could plug in all of these if you wanted a lot of it but some of them just it's not really much point in doing so you don't get all too much for it so you may as well just plug in the sort of one so you're going to use most of the time and there you go so you have control of the roughness over the metallicness but again I don't know if that's like the actual word there you go so turn the roughness down and we have all of our reflections on the outside perfect there we go that's all I want I'm going to turn that down and start playing with shadows here so now on to the image textures at hand so I'm using some that I just got off textures.com I'll put the link to this exact material in the uh in the description below this is just the abstract like concrete tiles it's uh I quite I quite liked the material it's also one that I've made a procedural version of so if you want to see that leave a comment down below saying if you want to but we can take all of this information and start plugging it into our details here so the color we will need to mix with the output of this but all of the rest of them which is just like the information for the sort of like the roughness the normal map and all of that we can just plug straight into here so we go ahead and plug the normal into the normal if we stop using that there we go our information will start appearing on the mesh that uh normal data so we can take the roughness as well plug that into the roughness take the they're all over the place here I'm going to start moving these around just to get a little bit extra sort of fanciness so if we take the height data here we can plug that into a normal map get that plug that in here get maybe a yeah bump map or something like that get the bump go plug that in here and plug the height data into the height and we'll start seeing some extreme effects let's turn those down to like point one make it a little bit less intense and this one is the ambient occlusion which is what we will be mixing with the the Albedo texture so if you get a ambient occlusion node like that plug the color in here and then grab a mix RGB node set it to multiply not darken multiply and then start plugging these in we now have some ambient occlusion data so if we get again this duplicate it plug it in there get our DOT Shader plug that in plug it into here take the output plug it into the material output we now have the mix of both but you might be looking at this thinking well that looks really flat really untidy like what's uh what's what's going on there so this is where we're going to need to start playing with these so if we want to make the lighter areas lighter we need to start bringing this back because it's multiplying the values together so it's the sort of flattening it out so what's already a dark texture if we just view this a lot of it's gray a lot of it's black it's darkening the whole thing so we need to essentially lighten the whole thing by playing with the values here so if we just bring this up a little bit bring this down a little bit maybe add in an even lighter color so if we just add in say white and just do not respect there we go we just add in white say and just turn these around you can start getting the highlights the dark areas and still maintaining all of the dots in the Shader there and there you have it all that's really left to do at this point is just start tidying some things up so if we just highlight all of this and do the same thing we did before and just hit Ctrl G that makes a group all of that's together and now everything is nice and tidy that why would you do that there we go evidence nice and tidy there you go you now have a wonderful little comic book Shader style whatever and you can continue to play around with this to all sorts of different things you can make this even more your own you can change this to constant get a sort of even more harsh looking Shader lots of stuff you can do with this I really like it I hope you guys like it too hit that like button if you do like it and I'll see you in the next tutorial

Channel: Littlerolz

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Id: xzz52hX5rzk

Length: 20min 21sec (1221 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 06 2022