Original subtitles

Toon shading! toon as in cartoon although some people might prefer using those labels to mean

different things and so keep the toon and cartoons apart as specialist's descriptors

different categories in their own right, i think it's always best to check everyone's

on the same page when it comes to terminology, so without getting into the origins of the word,

i think we can look at what it means in the relatively modern and most common use cases,

we're usually talking about 3d shaders made to emulate hand-drawn and colored 2d animation like

Mickey Mouse is as a very early example, Bugs Bunny the Flintstones films like the Little Mermaid

the Simpsons and animes such as One Punch Man, My Neighbor Totoro and Akira, all super influential

in their own way and the list could go on and on, there are plenty of tooned styles out there but

also plenty that bind the styles together, we're going to start pretty simple and work from there

especially the first five examples here, as apart from the backgrounds that tend to get a bit more

shading in the main characters and foreground action tend to be almost completely shadeless, taking the

yellow skin of Homer Simpson as an example, notice that it's just one flat single shade of yellow,

nothing in the shading is telling us about how three-dimensional the forms are intended to be,

but yet we can still interpret in this case easily what's going on. we'll come back to why that is in

a moment, anyway we can see from this example that toon shader could be just a simple flat color

which is a good place to start and really easy to set up in Blender. i'm going to start with this

cool octopus robot alien scene by Manu, there's a bunch of different materials on here so i'm going

to cut to a scene where every object is just using the same material and also i'll enable

Use Nodes for this in the shader editor. currently everything is going to go black because all it is

at the moment is just this material output with nothing plugged in and also was switched over to

Eevee since it was set to Cycles a moment ago and to achieve our flat shading all we need to do is

go Shift A and add in an Emission shader and then once we plug that into the surface we're gonna get

that flash shading of whatever color we choose, with Eevee, that's just fine, we can consider it done

we actually don't even need the Emission shader, we can actually just plug in an RGB value instead

and Blender will understand that the only way this is going to work is to interpret that as a kind of

Emission shader, it's just we don't really have the strength setting, but usually i like using an

emission shader just so that it's clear exactly what's going on, this is emitting light into the

scene, which is fine and dandy for Eevee, we can add in a plane here for example to scale that right up

and in Eevee that's perfectly fine, but since these are Emission shaders if we switch over to Cycles

we're gonna start seeing that Emission starting to emit into the scene which if for some reason

you're mixing the non-photoreal cartoony world with the all singing and dancing perks of a path

tracing realistic lighting engine like Cycles, then you might want to limit the emission onto

the surrounding environment, luckily that's easy to do with a light path node. let's go Shift A

input, light path, and then also we'll add in a mix shader and drop that in just before the material

output and then all we need to do is say if it's a camera array that is to say if the camera can

see it, then we're going to use an emission shader, so if we get white out of here we're going to get

the second socket, so let's switch that in there and if it's not a camera ray then we're going to

use whatever's in the first socket which in this case is actually nothing. so we get none of that

additional emission into the scene and just to clean things up a little bit, we can just go Ctrl H

to collapse that down. it's hard not to notice though at this point that with just a flat color

what we're looking at becomes very hard to read, but yeah we said a moment ago that even a flat

shadeless color is still enough to interpret what's going on visually, so what else do we

need, well it's probably quite obvious what we're missing and what a big part of the puzzle actually

is :) these examples are making use of contrasting outlines to help separate the forms. without the

outlines and with just that flat shading, we've lost too much detail to properly make sense of

what we're looking at, we're going to go over outlines in a separate chapter but i'm going

to include one of the main available methods to us right here and now in this chapter, so jumping back

to this .blend file here, i'm going to switch from Cycles back over to Eevee and the main method we're

going to cover right here is generally referred to as the inverse hull method so with this particular

object selected doesn't really matter which object though i'm going to come over to the modifiers and

i'm going to give this a Solidifier modifier. with the cursor in the 3d view i'm going to hit /

on the numpad so that we can just take a look at this one object very cleanly and switch over to

solid view for a moment, so the solidify is going to give some thickness like a shell to all the

faces on our object here and what we can do is we can specify a different material for all of these

new faces, so let's come over to our shading menu and take a look at slot 2 and then what we'll do

is click the little 402 there since 402 objects were using that material, now we have an exclusive

one, so this is the only object using this now and we'll just call this outline, for this just

for simplicity let's just change our emission color down to something pretty close to black and then

now let's take another look at our rendered view, now we can't see anything at the moment so what

we'll do is we'll tell the Solidify modifier that we're using our second material in the slot, so if

we want to see in this view as well we can just see that our outline is the second slot in our

material list there, in code it usually starts counting at zero, so this one's going to be zero

this one's going to be one, so when we come back over to our Solidify modifier we can set our

materials to be one, which is the second material our outline material in slot 2, but that doesn't

look quite right, although at least we can see it now, the other part of the puzzle is to simply flip

the normals of the faces, the new faces that are being created there, now by default a material

won't have backface culling on and so we're going to need to set that in our material, so if we just

find our backface culling setting in the settings, we're going to enable that and now we're starting

to get something which looks a little bit more like an outline, to get this to work properly we're

going to want to apply any scale, so i'm going to go Ctrl A and apply that scale we'll see a

little adjustment there. and then it's just going to be a matter of tweaking our thickness setting

to get an outline thickness that we like, one other thing that i just like to check is to tab into the

object, select everything with A and then come back over to the material and just check that all these

faces have this material assigned so with that selected i'm going to click assign that's looking

pretty good for the most part, something else that we need to check is our material direction

so with this one i'm also going to set the back face culling on and i saw something change in

the viewport there, so i think that not all of our faces are facing the correct way, so i'm going to

tab into edit mode again, Alt N to bring up our normals and we can recalculate outside or try

recalculating inside which is not quite right but that's pretty cool, so i'm going to go Alt

N and just recalculate outside, so this method isn't going to be perfect but as we can see it

actually does get us a lot of the way there, whilst talking about outlying, something that i wanted to

insert here just because it seems like the most logical place to put it, is that there's one last

thing we can do to our outline material and it's not really going to matter in this setup, because

we're just using an emission shader, but if we did want to change the setup so that we are using

more lighting and not just emission like this we're going to want to come down to our material

settings and turn the shadow mode to none. as you can see nothing happens in the view at the moment

because we're not say using a diffuse texture instead, basically we don't want the extra geometry

that we're creating to use for our outline to be considered when casting shadows on our objects, so

that's one object done, we don't want to have to do that to these other 400, one by one at least,

so let's go Shift G and select all off type, so all other geometry objects in other words and shift

select this one just make sure this one that we've already done is the correct active object and then

if we head over to our preferences and take a look at our add-ons and just make sure we have our copy

attributes add-on enabled, that's going to enable us to now go Ctrl C and copy a selected modifier

because we don't want to select a mirror modifier or anything like that and place that on objects

that don't need that and it looks like it's only giving us a subsurf option here, so i don't have

the correct object selected actually, so let's try that again plane.005 needs to be our active object

Shift G type plane.005 is still our active object so Ctrl C copy selected modifiers and then the

solidify modifier and then click ok. so that's done but we can see that we actually don't have much in

the way of outlines and that's because we haven't given it the material either, so Shift Alt and Z

just to bring all the wireframes back again and then go Ctrl L and then we're going to link the

materials, with that done that's looking much better, but i'm going to tab into edit mode again

select everything with A and click assign, i'm also going to go Alt N and we're going to recalculate

outside, that's made some changes, i'm also going to tab into object mode to apply the scale, but we'll

find that we can't do that for instanced objects but i'm fine with that as there's only a couple

of objects standing out as issues at the moment, so let's tackle those one by one, so i'm going to

select this piece, go Ctrl A, apply the scale, but we're still getting quite a lot of black on this

let's come over to the modifier and just tweak the thickness there until it looks about right

occasionally you might have an object like this, which if we turn off the solidify modifier can

actually see through to the sky, so this isn't an enclosed mesh like say a cube might be,

so what i'm going to do is actually add another Solidify modifier first, just to fix this, so this

is our new solidify modifier, i'm just going to click and drag it before our outlines and use

the default settings and then if we re-enable uh outline solidifier modifier we see it's looking

a lot more like we might expect, so let's / on the numpad back out of there and we can see

if we just take a more simpler background here, let's just blur it quite a lot and go Shift

Alt and Z just to get rid of any other little helpers in the scene, we can see that this is way

more readable now, might not be perfect and some things might need its own individual tweaking to

various different thicknesses, like maybe we want to make the tentacles more prominent, we might want

to increase our thicknesses, in fact if we select two objects at once so i've shift selected these

two tentacles on this side, we can hold down Alt take it up to something we might like to try like

0.5 or hold Alt while sliding and we'll be able to affect both of them at the same time,

so i think that's looking way more readable now and we'll explore the topic of outlines a bit

more in another chapter, before we move on from the super simple shading though, let's not overlook one

of the most simplest and performant options that may in some situations be enough to get the point

across, we switch over to the render engine section and we can see we've got a workbench as an option,

we can essentially get the workbench shading options in our solid shading view, so i'm just

going to switch that over there, and then click on the arrow to show some pull down information

and over in the lighting area we can switch that to flat and thankfully because we have our outline

enabled we even get some outlines in the mix, just going to go ctrl space to go full screen on this

now there is a section in the preferences where we can find our themes and the 3d

viewport and at the bottom of this we will find a section to do with outline width, but that's

referring to the outlines of the selected, so if we just turn on our viewport overlays there

it's referring to this orange outline here, so there's only so much we can do with this method

really and also it's not especially clean how we would separate things, but if i just add in a cube

here to just demonstrate something, let's scale that up a little bit, rotate it around, we can see

it's separated from the background there, this plane that we've placed on the ground, but if i

was to take this face here and press Y to separate it and just move it off slightly and press Tab to

get back into object mode, we can see there's still no separation there what we'd simply

need to do there is to press P to separate it into a separate object and then we'd be

able to see the separation and that's what we can see here, the outlines are showing us

that this for example is its own object, which we can select, we don't need to just have white of

course we can give each object its own colour, so if we go Ctrl Space we can go over to the object

settings and find our viewport display and there's a color right there and now we can see that stands

out so we can color things on a per object level or we can give everything a random color and we

have these other options of course, we also have a vertex option, which is something i'm going to

come back to in a moment and i'm also going to press the Backspace on that color just to reset

that back to default and just before we move on from this section i'm just going to point

out that there are shadows available, so we can switch this on and the little cog icon is going

to give us some extra settings there, we've got the shadow focus at the bottom and the higher we crank

that the cleaner the or the harsher the fall off becomes, so it's just a flat line, this is much more

typical of toon shading, we've also got the ability to shift the shadow in a few places as well as

left click and drag on this sphere that we have to completely change the direction, so

we can see in some cases this in of itself could make some decent tune rendering.