Toon Shaded Character Guide, from Modeling to Final Shading - Blender 2.91 / EEVEE

hey i'm thomas from lightning boy studio in today's video we're going to talk about how to make your own toon shaded character and blender we're going to share our own process our workflow and our techniques and hopefully those work out for you as well so our goal here is to try to put as much info as possible in one single video so that this can be sort of our standalone guide that you can always refer to if you're ever stuck in your own creative process so we'll cover modeling uv unfolding and texturing of course we're going to speed up the process quite a bit this won't be real time because building one of our characters usually takes us several days also we'd like to thank everyone that bought lightning boy shutter 2.0 which we launched at the end of 2020 it really helps us a lot and supports the channel and helps us work on our own personal project called dynomancers so for those of you who have bought this shader we'll share a lot of techniques on how to apply it on your character in this video alright that's enough talking for now let's open blender and let's get started okay so let's start at the very beginning most of the time when you're gonna model something you'll want some sort of concept art to help you get started it doesn't need to be something super fancy but our own personal philosophy is we like to find one or two things that can make our character iconic and focus on those once we know what we want our characters to look like we usually draw them in a t pose from both front view and side view these drawings are really useful especially at the beginning of the modeling process to get started right that way you know you'll have the right proportions and it should really help you get started one of the nice things about our character designs is that they are pretty simple overall so we don't need fancy zbrush sculpting or anything like that in our case we simply model them polygon by polygon directly in blender so usually the way we proceed is we start by creating a simple plane which is basically a polygon and then we add a mirror modifier that way we can simply work on one half of the character and the other half gets created at the same time you'll also notice that one of the options of the mirror modifier is called clipping it's to make sure that you can't bring your vertices on the other side of your character by mistake if the mirror modifier doesn't seem to be working it's probably because you moved the plane in object mode which means its origin is still in the middle of the plane to fix this you make sure to always work in edit mode and to be sure that the origin of your object is at the center of the world now let's talk about the modeling process first you need to select the object you want to work on and then you need to switch into edit mode to actually adjust the geometry to do that you either press tab or you select it in the upper left corner of your viewport now that you're in edit mode you can modify your geometry by using either vertices edges or faces so in this case i'll select edge mode click one of the edges here and hit e to extrude that edge that way you can model by creating more and more faces it's good practice to keep modeling in quads meaning that you want four sides on each of your polygon as much as possible you will get better results when adding subdivisions later on but it's also okay to use triangles here and there if you have no choice to bridge gaps you can select both edges and press f to fill you can also merge vertices by pressing m the knife tool can also be really useful to add new lines exactly where you need them just click where you want to add new vertices and it's going to add them automatically the loop cut will let you add new edge loops this can be really useful when you need to add more topology around elbow or knee area for instance because you need those areas to have enough resolution for them to bend properly most of these options can be accessed by right-clicking in edit mode or you can find them in the toolbar on the left side of your screen there are a lot of selection shortcuts that can save you a lot of time in blender so remember when i showed you the different selection modes here they each have specific shortcuts in edge selection mode you can alt click on an edge to select the whole edge loop in face selection mode you can alt click on an edge of the face to select an entire row of faces in any of those modes you can also control click on two edges or faces to select everything in between along the shortest path in any of those modes if you hit l while your mouse is above a specific part of your character you will select every pieces of geometry linked to that area it's an easy way to select different pieces of your character that are linked together you can also hit l many times in a row to add them to your overall selection once you have something basic modeled you might realize that the proportions are still slightly off even though you have your t-pose drawing to help when that happens the proportional editing tool can be a great way to adjust your geometry click on the target looking icon at the top of your screen then when you're in grab mode which you can activate by pressing g you'll see that a circle appears around your mouse that's your area of influence instead of moving single vertices you'll now be able to move stuff around using a soft selection gradient you can increase or reduce the influence using your mouse wheel if you have many unconnected parts on the same object such as clothes hair or accessories and you don't want to move them you can activate connected only only move vertices that are already connected it's pretty common to use a subdivision modifier on a character mesh this modifier allows to add more geometry to your character which makes it look more hd more round and can get rid of shadow artifacts the good thing with this modifier too is that you can easily toggle it on and off so you can still model with your lower res version which is much easier to tweak however this stand to round off many of the sharp edges that sometimes help give your model more of a stylized look to fix this you can manually raise the crease value of certain edges to keep them sharp at all times this option can be accessed by pressing n and clicking on item and then under edge data you'll find something called crease for example this helmet looks pretty bad when we apply the subdivision modifier by default but once we give certain edges a crease value of one we're able to give a nice rounded surface around the helmet while keeping other edges sharp where they need to be you can also achieve this by adding a small bevel on your edges instead but since we're doing a simple stylized character the crease value is much faster and will get you pretty much the same result as you'll see later in this tutorial we use the solidify modifier to generate outlines but it can also be very useful for adding thickness to close look at this gate for example if you wanted to have more thickness you might be tempted to model it by extruding the faces but then it'll be way harder to modify and rig by simply adding a solidify modifier you can keep the thickness constant and non-destructive same for these dinomancer's belt straps which are extremely simple and easy to model this way but what can you do when you only want the solidify modifier to affect certain pieces of your mesh let's say for example that you combined this character's cape with his shirt and you don't want the shirt to have a thickness like this in that case you can just go in the vertex group options and click on this plus button here create a new group and name it however you want go in edit mode and select the faces that you want to be part of this group then you click on assign and there you go the solidify modifier will now only affect these faces modelling a character's face is always very challenging and even when working on a toon shaded character it's no different your modeling style can vary a lot depending on the style you're going for in our case we quickly realized that the more details we modeled in 3d like 3d lips or 3d eyelids the more we would get artifacts and weird edges with our toon shading on top of that because of the cartoony look of our characters we knew we wanted to deform the faces as needed and that in some case we would want to deform them quite a lot so for that reason we decided that the facial rig would be completely separated from the character's face mesh as you can see the mouth is closed we are only using a thin painted line of geometry which gives a great 2d feel and when we want the mouth to open we use a boolean to carve out a mouth interior same thing for the eyes which are completely separated from the face we'll explain how to do a facial rig in another video it can be a very complex setup and it's worth an entire tutorial in itself but we just wanted to let you know that it's totally possible to not model lips eyelids and all those details as part of the face mesh itself so this concludes the main steps of our modeling process if you're still using the mirror modifier at this stage you'll want to apply it so that it becomes real geometry of course feel free to model however you prefer some people like to scope their model and re-to apologize after which is great too this is just our own approach for these types of models now you'll want to start applying colors and textures and more complex shading this is where materials come in and where people sometimes get lost and have trouble getting things to look good there are a couple of ways to approach this step if you're not afraid of technical stuff and would like to really understand how to build shaders you could watch our previous tutorial series which will teach you how to build a toon shader node by node for this particular character guide however we're going to show you how to use the lightning boy shader 2.0 which was inspired by the same toon shader series but rebuilt from the ground up to be more versatile and intuitive for artists the problem when you make your own toon shader in general is that they are often built for a specific style in particular and if you want to change any aspect of it you have to dig deep inside of your node trees to tweak specific details which can take a lot of time and effort we'll show you how easy it is to set up a full character using our system and if you like it you can buy it on our gumroad page this is what it looks like when you open the lightning boy shader 2.0 blend file first thing i'm going to do is change the rendering mode to rendered then delete the sphere in the middle by default in this scene you'll also see many lights and spheres don't worry about these for now we'll talk about it later when we explain how to link your materials to specific lights using our feature library so let's get started we're going to append our character to this scene if you don't know append is the equivalent of importing in blender so we will import the character we made into this scene we like to apply outlines on our characters luckily lightning boy shader 2.0 comes with an easy preset for it to apply an outline find the solidify outline object use shift d to duplicate it and drag it in the same collection as your character model then selecting your object first and the solidify outline second you can press ctrl j to join them if you have multiple objects you'll need to repeat that step a couple of times you might also have to play with the solidifier modifier's thickness and offset for things to look right in certain cases sometimes you might need to actually change your geometry in edit mode to fix specific interpenetration like on the helmet here and sometimes you might want to remove the outline altogether in certain areas for example on this sleeve to do that select the edges you want to exclude in edit mode then assign them to a vertex group named solidify which should have been created automatically when you join the solidify outline object to your mesh earlier you might have to invert the vertex group influence in the solidify modifier for this to work properly so now that we got an outline we're going to make a simple gray material to establish the shading style let's look at our concept again as you can see the shading is mostly sharp if you take a look at the hand or the boot we've got some basic textures applied with scratches on the torso and what feels like soft occlusion which adds darker shadows and makes it look more real finally we got a strong rim light coming from the right to separate the character from the background let's see if we can reproduce all of this in 3d so now back to our scene we're going to apply the base lightning boy shader material to our character first select your geometry in object mode and then apply the lbs material on each part of your character now let's open the shader editor and look at what the base lightning by shader material looks like we've got a color feature node which will be useful to apply a color a key light node for illumination and a specular we're going to remove the specular node for the time being one thing that you need to know about the lightning boy shader 2.0 is how to add or remove layers as you can see with the base lightning boy shader material it comes with only three layers but what happens if you want more or less you can always click on this icon here and it'll give you a lot of options for how many layers your material can have you can go up to 12 so you can be really creative with how you customize your shader it's really easy to add or remove layers as you go along so feel free to adjust this however you need okay now back to our character let's adjust the key light and make it sharper by dropping the softness to zero and increase the range a little bit now the only thing we seem to be missing is occlusion and a rim light to add new features you're going to need to pick them in the lightning boy shader library so let's click on it in the outliner and open the shader editor the lightning boy shader library contains all the notes that you can use with the lightning boy shader 2.0 so anytime you need a new node you can always open this and grab whatever node you need and copy it over to the material you're working on so in this case we're going to grab an ambient occlusion feature a 2d outline feature and a blue key light from the extra selection which is perfectly suited for special effects like rim lights press ctrl c to copy them and let's paste them into our material let's start by hooking up the ambient occlusion we'll connect it in layer three for it to work you'll also need to make sure that ambient occlusion is enabled in the render properties okay so with that done you'll see that you have occlusion appearing on your model and you can control the range and softness in the settings on the right a cool thing would be for the occlusion to only appear in the shadowed area which would be more realistic but right now it appears everywhere so let's see there's a couple of ways you can do this but what we're going to do here is duplicate our key light and change the invert values to one we're then going to connect the two gray circles together if you reveal the nodes by clicking on these arrows you'll see that what we just did is connect the key light's mask to the occlusion's opacity and there you have it the occlusion only appears in shadowed areas masking is really useful and one of the things that's extremely easy to do with the lightning boy shader 2.0 system because of how the features are used as separate layers anything can be masked and anything can be used as a mask too just like in photoshop it's actually very important to understand this concept in order to get creative with this shader so let us quickly demonstrate how this works we're going to look at what this mask output looks like by connecting it directly in the material output so you see how we get a pure black and white color when you invert it the colors switch back and forth so what it means to use a mask like this is that everywhere where you see white your node will take effect and everywhere where you see black your node won't be applied at all you can also duplicate these nodes and use them on the material of your floor that way your floor will also have ambient occlusion and you'll have all the same settings that you can use on your character okay now it's time to add the rim light that we're still missing we're going to add a new layer by clicking on this selection here which says three lightning body shader and change it to four then we're going to connect the 2d outline in layer 4 and change it to a white color now you see that we have what looks like a 2d light appearing all around our character like a fresnel effect what we're going to do is restrict it to our key light b by connecting it in this l-shaped input when it's done we'll be able to use the influence value to change the size of the outline cool as you can see we can now rotate the light around and it's going to cast shadows like a real light but it will only ever appear at the edge of our character no matter what angle we look at at this point you might still be a little confused why we keep referring to our lights as red blue and green or rgb key lights the reason we name our lights based on colors like rg or b is that this is the way light linking is achieved with the lightning boy shader as you see if you click in each of these main lights they each cast one of the pure primary color in the light properties on the right now as long as you use a node from the lightning boy shader library you will never actually see those colors appear in the scene there is color filtering happening under the hood which means that if you use nodes from the character section here which is labeled as red it will isolate everything but the lights casting red colors in your scene if you use nodes from the background section labeled green only the green casting lights will affect it and so forth by default the lightning boy shader material is set up to use the key light r which we recommend to use on characters the ground uses the green key light which leaves the blue key light to create special effects like rim lights a side effect of this is of course if you use the lightning boy shader on your character you should use it everywhere in your scene since other materials will receive these red green or blue lights and you don't want that but the lightning boy shader is very versatile and can easily be used to create the materials for your environment now would be a great time to start applying some basic colors to do that we'll need more materials let's click on this plus button a couple more times choose the lightning boy shader material for each one and make them all unique copies by clicking on this number on the right that way we'll be able to edit each one independently you can rename them as well so maybe you'll want one for the skin one for the clothes another one for the belt and so on then what you need to do is apply the material to the correct geometry by going in edit mode with tab selecting the desired geometry with l and clicking assign at this point your solidify outline will probably start to look weird that's because in the solidify modifier settings we tell it to look at the previous material to set the color of the outline you see this number -1 that means that it's looking for the material before so if you apply the skin material to your character's arm the outline of the arm will take the color of the material above it which is black in this instance to fix this make sure to insert a solidify outline material above each of your surface material you can leave them all black for now but if you want you can also make them unique copies so that the outline for the skin is a lighter brown for example or use a dark red for the outline of the shirt so now it's time to add a basic color on your character let's say we take this red shirt here we need to assign two colors with this current setup a color for the dark part of the shirt so a dark red and a color for the lit part of the shirt which would be a brighter red you can do this for every materials of your character okay so now we see what our character looks like with some basic colors applied we're getting closer but our character could definitely use some more painted details to do this we'll need to make sure our character is properly unwrapped or in other words that it has uvs if you're new to the concept of unwrapping your geometry think of it like this imagine that your 3d character is made of cardboard you're basically unfolding every piece of your character so that it becomes a flat surface and from there you can easily paint details on it so to do that we're going to need to make some cut lines to do the same thing on this red shirt we'll first have to define cuts go back into edit mode and select the desired edges then press u to access the uv mapping options and click on mark seam the edges will turn red so you know these ones are marked when you've marked all the seams that you want you can unwrap the faces by pressing u again and clicking unwrap you can see the result by extending the timeline window and changing it to the uv editor what you want to look for is to minimize stretch and not have pieces overlap each other you want to make cuts where they will be less visible on your character like under their armpits inside the legs and in between the fingers also keep in mind that you don't have to get it right on the first try it's okay to do quick unwraps to test things out and if it's not working you can always go back mark more seams and remove some and press unwrap again if you have multiple geometry pieces sharing the same material it's possible that they overlap to fix this you can go to uv pack islands and blender will reorganize all the selected uvs for you great so now that we have uvs we're ready to paint textures the way we painted all our textures for this project was by using black and white masks might sound like a weird idea at first you're probably much more used to seeing full color textures like this one these were painted in photoshop during our earlier tests a few years ago while the photoshop brushes are nice and more intuitive it can be difficult to see what you're doing so here's what's cool about black and white masks you can see the result directly in blender in real time with the final shading unlike if you were painting in let's say substance painter here's how it works first we'll need a color node so let's go back to the material library and let's pick this color node here and copy paste it on this skin material now we can create a new image texture using shift a then selecting image texture you can rename it however you like we'll call this one skin mask we'll use a 4k texture for this one and connect it in the alpha mask input here that means it is now being used as a mask controlling this color now if you go in the top left menu you can switch to texture paint and then press n to access the tool menu on the right you'll see your newly created texture here at the top if you go in brush settings and then color picker by default you should have white as the primary color and black as the second so if you remember how we explained the mask earlier wherever you will paint white is where your node will appear and if you hit ctrl and then paint you will actually be painting black which means your node won't take effect in that area the way we personally work is by setting the stroke method to line and change the falloff to constant which gives us very nice sharp edges let's paint some lines on the fingers to add some details so here we're drawing using the line stroke method and then erasing by holding ctrl so that we can get those thinner strokes as you can see if i switch back to the shader editor i can adjust the color of what i painted and change the opacity using this slider this is why we love this technique you just concentrate on painting the shapes but you still have full control over the opacity and color afterwards while painting there are a few options that can be really useful first symmetry you can find it by pressing n under the tool setting when you're in texture paint mode click on the right axis in our case here it's x but depending on how you model your character it might be another one and then you can paint symmetrical patterns on each side for example if you use this technique you can paint the details on the fingers only once and they will also be updated on the other side also if you select geometry in edit mode you can click these two squares in the upper left of your screen to only be able to paint on the selected faces one thing you can do with this is select some faces then use a very large brush with a soft fall off to create a fading effect without affecting your other paint strokes the cool thing about this technique is that you don't have to stop at one color and one texture if you look at this shirt for example we use a three color node which means that we can set up up to three colors each with their own mask within the same node the bottom color doesn't need any mask because it's the underlying color but we're using two other black and white masks to drive these color here which we can always change whenever we want once you start creating textures with several colors you'll likely find it very useful to use the color adjustment node so here's how it works you can just grab your color adjustment node and bring it over to your shader then let's take the colors that we said before and limit them to the key light area we can then use that same color node but hook it in the color adjustment note now we can adjust the colors in the color adjustment node and it'll affect all three colors that we said before so in this case we'll use a color adjustment node to darken this red shirt but notice how the parts lit by the key light remain the same because they're hooked in the layer above it now it's time to dive deeper and have fun fine-tuning each material to our liking let's look at this belt which is metallic unlike the shirt this material is using very similar nodes except we added a specular to make it look shiny and a duplicate of that same specular underneath with softer values so that it looks like some sort of glow if you duplicate multiple nodes like this it can be easier to rename them for clarity you can do it by selecting the node and pressing n however when you do so make sure to change the name of the label and not the node group itself otherwise all the specular nodes in your scene will share this new name instead of just this single node another really cool node is the matte cap node we personally don't use this one on every metallic surface but it's very good for fake reflections for example let's look at this metal ball we use the same double specular node we showed earlier and the color node to make scratches but we also use a matte cap node what it does is use a simple matte cap image texture and project it on top of the surface based on the normals so even if we were to stretch the surface of the ball you see that the reflection still follows and you can easily adjust the texture of this matte cap yourself in photoshop or even make your own matte caps to change the matte cap texture all you have to do is make the note group unique by clicking on this number and here we're just going to give it a unique name so we know what this is then press tab with the matcap node selected and inside you'll be able to edit the texture path you can get very different results depending on the mat gap you're using so have fun experimenting with that once you understand what all these nodes do and a good way for that would be to read through the user guide that comes with that lightning boy shader 2.0 there's really no limit to what you can do with the shader especially once you understand the power of masking for example take the face of ballista here we didn't like how the light interacted with his face no problem we simply made a black and white texture and use it to mask over the opacity of the key light now we can paint where the light is transparent giving us much more control over the look of the character and we didn't just do this on his face we use this in multiple places like under the belt and on the boots and so on so that way these areas will always have this nice little shadow regardless of how we like the scene one material that is always tricky to get right on a toon shaded character is the hair if you want to keep the look very flat looking then it's not a problem but if you want to add details and make it look slightly more realistic you can add a specular feature from the library now by default it'll probably look kind of metallic which is not right that's because in real life hair tend to have very long specular instead of a circle like this this is the result of tens of thousands of hair that you'll find on someone's head since we're doing a stylized character we don't want to add all those individual hair but we can fake it using a pre-built style that comes with the lightning boy shader 2.0 so what we're going to do is go to the lightning boy shader library and under styles find the anisotropic style copy paste it into your material then we're going to drag and drop it between the specular and the lightning boy shader that's going to use the original specular shape and make some modifications to it it's normal if you don't see anything different at first in our case we need to adjust the general offset because the specular is hidden inside the helmet you also want to check your uvs because they need to be unfolded a specific way for the style to work correctly in short you want your unwrapped uvs to flow vertically as you can see if you rotate the hair in the uv editor the specular is going to rotate as well you can also move the uvs to position the specular exactly where you want it next we're going to add some details to it we're going to increase the stripes and repeat values to create some negative space and then play with the deform and complexity values to create more of a wavy shape at any time you can open the original specular options and change the color generally you'll want to make sure that the specular has quite a large range otherwise the effect will be hard to see to give a more organic look to your lights you can use what we call a painterly style go to the lightning boy shader library pick any of these painterly styles features and like with the anisotropic specular drag and drop it on the line connecting a layer to the lightning boy shader for example you could use it on this key light which will add a grungy texture to all the gray transition areas of the light mask this can be useful when you have a very close-up shot and you want to break it up to look a little less perfect and 3d earlier we've shown how to use the ss occlusion which is the real-time occlusion you get from eevee but you can also use baked occlusion and we even have a special note for it which lets you change the softness and range easily if you're confused about the difference between these two occlusion types it goes like this ambient occlusion ss is a simplified version of occlusion it's the simplest to set up because it works kind of automatically as soon as you activate the occlusion in your scene baked occlusion requires an extra step you need to bake occlusion on your character yourself and export it as a texture baked occlusion can be more precise and might catch some extra details that occlusion ss might not get you can combine the two occlusions technique on a single character if you want since they both have their pros and cons one thing you'll notice is that you can quickly end up with a lot of materials and it can be difficult to adjust everything at once for example let's say i wanted to change the rim-like color it can be tedious to change it on every single material of the character this is something we planned for with the lightning boy shader 2.0 if you notice that a node has an asterisk next to its name it means you can access additional options by clicking on it and pressing tab the relevant nodes will always be very apparent in an orange box so if you want to change the color of the rim light globally in the scene you can change the opacity and the color from here another thing you can do is use what we call a scene adjustment we like to use one as the last layer on every material by default it does nothing so it might seem useless at first but if you add one on every of your materials you can press tab and darken all the materials at once which can be really useful if you're animating a complex shot and need to tweak lighting or if your shot is taking place during night here's an example of a dark scene that would be lit by a purple light as you can see we're using the scene adjustment layer to darken our character and tint him to the right color but if you notice before we hook the scene adjustment underneath the rim light that means that although we're affecting all the colors of our character at once the rim light will remain unaffected so this was our overview of how we model our characters and use the lightning boy shader 2.0 to give them this toon shaded look we tried to cover as much as we could so sorry if it felt a bit rushed at times there is still so much more to cover about the lightning by shader 2.0 but we couldn't fit it all in a single video like this we will share more tips in future videos for sure and if you want you can also follow our twitter page where we show various tricks via highlight videos alright that was a lot of information hopefully some of it was useful for you as always thank you so much for watching if you like this tutorial and you want to see our next ones be sure to subscribe to our channel and if some of these techniques were helpful for you to make your own character please share your work with us you can tag us on twitter and we always love to see what you're working on so i guess that's it for today's video until next time take care and have fun [Music] creating

Channel: Lightning Boy Studio

Views: 83,448

Keywords: Lightning Boy Studio, Dinomancers, Official Lighting Boy Studio, Lightning Boy Shader, Lightning Boy Shader 2.0, Blender Toon Shader, Blender Toon Shader Guide, Anime Toon Shader, Anime Toon Shader Guide, Toon Shader Blender 2.91, Lightning Boy Toon Shader, Thomas Lightning Boy Studio, Complete character tutorial Blender, Character Tutorial Blender, Toon Shaded character blender tutorial, cell shaded character tutorial, Beginner guide for modeling in Blender

Id: spz6bpGYJZQ

Length: 34min 18sec (2058 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 09 2021