Creating a Toon Material to Emulate 2D Animation

[Michael Pedro]

My goal is to somehow create a Toon Material that produces the look of sophisticated 2D animation.  Specifically, the material needs to have the contour (easy part), a HINT of shadow/occlusion gradient (easy part), but also solid steps of value to emulate light/shadow (the part I can't figure out).

Here are a few images of what I'm trying to hit:







I'll note that it appears someone at Luxion has already figured this out, as that second image shows more-or-less what I'm describing with regard to solid shadows.   

Any tips would be greatly appreciated.  Thanks!

[DriesV]

Hi Michael,

You can use a Point Light to achieve this effect.
Import a sphere into your scene and assign a Point Light Diffuse material to it. Make sure that 'Light Source Shadows' (in the Advanced accordion) is checked for the Toon material.

Attached is a sample scene and rendering. Model from https://threedscans.com/.

Dries

[Michael Pedro]

Dries,

Thanks for your reply!  This is exactly what I was looking for.  One issue though ... For some reason, the shadows caused by the Point Light material go black and aren't picking up the shadow color set within the toon material, whereas the shadows caused by the environment work just fine.  Thoughts on what I might do to alleviate this?  Screenshot attached.

[DriesV]

Hi Michael,

The shadow color currently does not affect shadows from local lights. I believe this is something that slipped for KeyShot 7.0. I just added an improvement request for this.
I assume you would always want the shadow color to affect both environment and light source shadows?

It seems like in your example the Shadow Strength is set all the way to 1? This will turn light source shadows completely black. Lowering the shadow strength should show greytone shadows and reveal more of the color and contour shading in the shadowed areas.

I hope this helps.

Dries

[DriesV]

... For some reason, the shadows caused by the Point Light material go black and aren't picking up the shadow color set within the toon material, whereas the shadows caused by the environment work just fine.

This has now been fixed for KeyShot 7.1.

Dries

[Michael Pedro]

Dries

NICE!  Now release the update! 

Regarding the shadow strength, I turned it up to 1 just to more easily demonstrate the difference in color from local light shadows and environments shadows.  Love the material though!  Lot's of possibilities.

Thanks!

[Michael Pedro]

Here is a quick test I prepared yesterday.  Found a work-around to achieving solid, carved shadows without using a point light.  I created a black environment, then used the HDRI editor to add a pin with an incredibly small radius of 3 and falloff of 0.1.  Gave me harder shadows with the color of my choosing.

Vignetting & Bloom added in PS CC.

[Esben Oxholm]

Nice! I like the look of it!

[Michael Pedro]

Thanks Esben!

Another test ...

[Will Gibbons]

Dang. These are cool!