The BRAWL² Tournament Challenge has been announced!
It starts May 12, and ends Sept 12. Let's see what you got!
https://polycount.com/discussion/237047/the-brawl²-tournament
It starts May 12, and ends Sept 12. Let's see what you got!
https://polycount.com/discussion/237047/the-brawl²-tournament
Dwarf Igris with aiToonShader
polycounter lvl 2
Hello everybody!
I've spent some time working on an anime stylized project, where I used an Arnold's toon shader. I wrote this article to not forget how to set up the toon shader next time and maybe help someone else if they struggle with the same thing. Will really appreciate your feedback on my setup! Maybe there was a much simpler way to do it.
After I model everything and apply aiToonShader, I connect base color textures and create tone maps. The first problem I encountered was applying an opacity map to fabric. There wasn't an opacity map in the shader, so I decided to use transparency. It's not a very comfortable way, because you need to turn on specular for transparency to work. And for me, it was a big problem, because now my fabric did not look like fabric. Even after connecting the base color texture into a specular color and setting roughness to 1, I still had to clean up artifacts on the cape in Photoshop.
The next very important step is to set the IOR to 1 in the transparency tab. Now I understand that it was obvious, but for me back then it was a whole drama. Thanks to the Prathades on Reddit for helping with this.
The next part was to create contour lines. I turned on silhouette and changed the type of filter on contour in Arnold renderer settings. Then I connect an already painted normal map to the shader and reduce the angle threshold in the edge detection tab in shader settings.
I also add cell noise texture to the edge and silhouette width. More details on how to do it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4gFbn81YPwU&t=2s.
The last part was to create highlights. There is a whole tab for that in the shader called stylized highlights. The important part here is that it works with directional and spot lights. Maybe there are more lights, but they were the only ones I found.
Because of how different armor looks with specular on, I used AOVs to make reflections more controllable, and after that put everything together in Photoshop. Here are the final results:
Thanks for reading!
I've spent some time working on an anime stylized project, where I used an Arnold's toon shader. I wrote this article to not forget how to set up the toon shader next time and maybe help someone else if they struggle with the same thing. Will really appreciate your feedback on my setup! Maybe there was a much simpler way to do it.
After I model everything and apply aiToonShader, I connect base color textures and create tone maps. The first problem I encountered was applying an opacity map to fabric. There wasn't an opacity map in the shader, so I decided to use transparency. It's not a very comfortable way, because you need to turn on specular for transparency to work. And for me, it was a big problem, because now my fabric did not look like fabric. Even after connecting the base color texture into a specular color and setting roughness to 1, I still had to clean up artifacts on the cape in Photoshop.
The next very important step is to set the IOR to 1 in the transparency tab. Now I understand that it was obvious, but for me back then it was a whole drama. Thanks to the Prathades on Reddit for helping with this.
The next part was to create contour lines. I turned on silhouette and changed the type of filter on contour in Arnold renderer settings. Then I connect an already painted normal map to the shader and reduce the angle threshold in the edge detection tab in shader settings.
I also add cell noise texture to the edge and silhouette width. More details on how to do it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4gFbn81YPwU&t=2s.
The last part was to create highlights. There is a whole tab for that in the shader called stylized highlights. The important part here is that it works with directional and spot lights. Maybe there are more lights, but they were the only ones I found.
Because of how different armor looks with specular on, I used AOVs to make reflections more controllable, and after that put everything together in Photoshop. Here are the final results:
Thanks for reading!