What do you look for in a toon/art shader? What are your inspirations?

almahiedra · May 2013

SmallFry said:

5) Presets, presets, presets. pwToon offered presets for Pin-Up styles, but only for a small subset of what's out there. What does one do to create a Pin-up look for someone who's not a blonde California girl wearing a white shirt and blue shorts?
6) Something that I don't have to use the Shader Editor to customize. I have a college degree in Computer Science, but the Shader Editor confuses me. I just want to make pretty pictures, not program a new shader.

Six affect five. I am just now creating a series of color preset for my shader and having catalogued four or five variations in 45 fundamental colors is a nightmare make all this presets. Shader editor and surface tab doesn't aid. I understand when people only set a few presets in their products.

almahiedra · May 2013

SnowSultan said:
The person who suggested shadows that are not dependent on lighting is on the right track. The only way that we're ever going to get better cel-shading in 3D is when we're able to manually set the coverage of shadows on each surface and not have it be based on where real 3D lighting falls.
Would this be possible? : create a shader with a secondary diffuse color that can be applied over the base layer (like what the Ubersurface2 already does), but with 1) a falloff control that shrinks the area affected by the diffuse (so you can adjust the size of the region that gets recolored) and 2) XY (or UV) transition controls that allow the recolored area to be moved around the surface (kind of like how we can use the U and V dials to move textures around on the UVs or repeat tiling patterns). That would enable us to apply a shaded area to a leg for example, then use the controls to change the size of the shaded area and move it around the surface so that it only shades as much of the leg as we want it to, regardless of lighting.

Just a thought. :)

SnowS

I think this can be achieved in shader builder for shadows. For current shader mixer...never. I think in something like this and I have some clues, but I can't time due my job for try.

Eustace Scrubb · May 2013

Presets out the wazoo, certainly, but there's more to it than that.

No matter what visual effect I'm looking at, the shader needs to
* use most of the same value-names in the same places as the Default Shader, so that I can copy and paste my settings into it.
* be mappable in most channels, at minimum Diffuse,Opacity, Bump Displacement, and perhaps two or three others as well; Spec and Ambient are bonuses, but Reflection and Refraction do NOT need maps.
* render fairly quickly, unless calculating a raytrace (Reflection or Refraction).
* reflect & refract correctly, or not at all.
* handle opacity correctly!

Sphinx Magoo · May 2013

With the pinup presets in pwToon, the problem was that they were almost TOO specific to a certain set of hair, skin type, and clothing. The colors of the outlines and shading left me scratching my literal-minded head a bit as to how to adapt them to other objects.