Beginners cel-shader experiment.

[Prowokator]

I have seen lots of attempts to create cel-shading (or is it cell-shading?) and I too have noticed how useless ink-and-paint material is.. atleast in my hands Quick search in Google doesn't really give much, only the same old tutorials with falloff shaders. So anyways I thought I give it a go to create my own cell-shader today.

It is a simple composite material:

Base: "mental ray" material, and that has "Ambient/Reflective occlusion" shader for surface and "Combi contour" for Contour shader.

1: "mental ray" material, it has a set of falloff shaders using light/shadow setting and the mix curves are adjusted so there is no blending between the colors.

Ofcourse the "contours" are enabled too from rendering settings. And that contour shader in base material has been adjusted so that the line thickness changes correctly on this current distance. Also, the lights (2) don't use shadows at all. I actually forgot to adjust one of the falloff shaders for the rendering so that there would be "highlights" of pure white, but heh, you get the point

I believe this would easily work with moving camera in an animation.. Here is a 700kb mov for you to check out:


dl.getdropbox.com/u/774532/pyorahdys.mov


(sorry I still can't post links as my post count isn't high enough)

I'm all ears (or should I say eyes..) for your comments and suggestions how to make it better!

Cheers,
prowokator.

[TheAllusionist]

Just need 5 post to put up a link, but I will do it for you:

http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/774532/pyorahdys.mov

It is working pretty good, working in line overshoots, etc. would make it even more useful for archvis. Nice work so far, hope you share it at MrM when you get it where you want Welcome to Mr Materials!

Thanks for sharing the technique and process with us.

[Prowokator]

Cheers! I need to tweak it and test it how it works for animation / moving camera. And I just noticed that I forgot to add pure white for "specular highlights" Now it looks a bit dull.. Also what I have in mind is making the actual use of the shader faster, so that I can just choose one color, lets say blue, and the current grey scale shading just adjusts it for light/shade. Havent really thought how to do that though. I'll share when it's done (and if it's never done I'll share it anyway )

[simplychen]

looks great, pro. thanks for the time spent on working on a new material and sharing it with us

[TheAllusionist]

You may also look here and try the DL3D shader Download shaders | download and the new Xtoon looks interesting. Just wanted to share this link, it may help you in your experimentation here