Original subtitles

Another way to make things easier to read is to introduce some more shading! :) going back to the

animations mentioned earlier let's take a look at the three other examples. notice there's this

additional mid-tone to help define the forms, in One Punch Man we can see that on the neck and

the glove, in My Neighbor Totoro we can see that kind of shading in the sleeves and on the faces

and then Akira... well you got the point. this additional shading is used pretty much all

through the Simpsons film too as it happens to give it that extra bit of polish, that is aside

from the obvious way wider aspect ratio, the more shading you get, the less you need those outlines

as helpers, because the shading itself is helping to describe the forms. so the shading could be

a smooth gradient as it is more likely to be found in realistic rendering or we can see in

this example be simplified, that is to say, stylized down into just one or just a few tones of value

taking the Octobot again, there's an easy way to do that with the workbench shadows, but that's pretty

limited, so let's explore some other options. we'll look at two main approaches here, normal based

and lighting based and keep in mind these can be combined too. let's set up a normal based approach

first, so this is quite good for more ambient, that is to say not strong directional lighting, because

we don't really get any self-shadowing. so while we can take a face here for example and press E

to extrude that out, we can see this shadow line cutting across here, if i just undo that and come

over to the other object and extrude out from here, you can see we're not going to get any shadows

coming here, because this is all normal based. all right so i'm going to build this kind of shader

again, but with a little bit more explanation along the way, so i'm going to press the X button to

remove that material from this particular object, now let's create a new one and then call this new

normal, why not and then so that the other objects all have it as well, i'm going to left click

and drag across, them Control L and then link the materials and then we can click away there now and

let's get to work on our shader. so we're not going to use the Principled bsdf so i can delete that

and we can just see this outline material and the blackness of this one. so what we're going to start

with is an input, texture coordinate and i'm going to Ctrl Shift click on the normal output, so Ctrl

Shift clicking on it a couple of times and this is what we're going to use, so it looks a little

strange like this, but we're going to convert it into a dot product, so if we go Shift A and add

in a vector normal, so we have the normal going into the normal, but we control Shift Click on this

to get the dot product output, hopefully all will be revealed, we can kind of see with the sphere

set like this we can left click and drag in here to just move this around, but we can see from this

angle we're shining a light straight down onto all of our objects, so it's kind of akin to being

in top view like this, so we're looking straight down on a sphere, this is how i like to imagine it

in the node editor anyway, to make this potentially more clear, let's go Shift A and add in a uv sphere

and i'm going to shade that smooth, scale that up a little bit, put it off to the side and then

Shift select one of those objects and control L to link the material to it, so we can see now

it becomes a little bit more obvious as to what's going on and we can see it's slightly off actually

so after i've clicked it like this, i've not quite put it right back where it was, so if we

want to reset it we can just click the Backspace on it and i'll flatten it right out, so with this

it's important what orientation the object is in object mode, so if we take a look at the rotation

information here, we can see this is zeroed out which is what we want for this kind of technique,

but if we were to double tap R and rotate it off we can see we're going to get inconsistent results

if certain objects aren't all aligned in the same way or more importantly, we want to go Ctrl A and

apply rotation on everything, that is something i've already gone ahead and done on this object

let's leave this sphere hanging around just to help us in case we need any clearer demonstration

of actually what we're doing, so this is as though a light is shining straight down on here, but this

is just simply a linear falloff from white to black, from one to zero, halfway is going to be 0.5,

but that's not quite how a light really works, what we would get instead, we would have a fall off a

lot of power from that light very close to it, but then weaker and weaker the further it got away

kind of exponentially, which is what we're going to set here, so a power of 2 should be a little

bit more natural, we see it goes from white to black to white again but i know that we

can simply create a clamp node and stick that here to force the values coming out of this node to be

between zero and one and that will allow our power node to behave correctly. from there to turn this

from a nice soft gradient, what we can do is use our map range node, so i'm going to drop that in

and simply set that to Stepped Linear. we've got four steps so far, which is perhaps most

easily recognizable on the sphere there, but we can just set that down to one step, so black and

white or zero and one, as we may like to think of it because i'd like to use this as a factor

input to drive a mix rgb node, so let's plug that into the factor and whatever's black is going to

show up in this first swatch, let's just set it to black for now and then in the second swatch

is going to essentially be our light, let's pretend it is a white light, even if it was,

this would still only be white if the object itself is white, so let's say our object is

actually slightly blue and also a little bit off pure white there, so drop the value down a bit and

in the ambient area in the dark shadows perhaps that's slightly blue also, now to give a little

recap, basically all we're doing is taking the normal output, putting that through the normal node,

taking the dot product of that and really we can actually do away with these nodes, so if i select

them and press M to mute you can see that majority of the work is actually just being done by this

map range, because of our steps, our stepped linear is set to one, now you may think well what's really

the point of these nodes then well, that's really just going to boil down to exactly how many steps

you might like to try and incorporate in this kind of technique, so if we unmute those nodes, you can

see that as we increase our power or decrease our power, we get that different falloff, each band is

its own size, something else to consider is we can kind of adjust the size of the light with our from

min here, so as i start to raise this up we can see we're shrinking the light source down, now at some

point, we're going to break it just as we go into the minus figures, but if we were to mute these, we

can actually take it way further, so now that we're not clamping things anymore, we can actually take

it much beyond what you might expect it should be able to reach, obviously the light source looking

straight down shouldn't really be able to reach underneath here but if that's the kind of desired

look we're going for, we do have that option if you want to do away with these nodes, i'm going

to leave these just muted for now just to try and keep things as simple as we can and i'll set

that back to zero and the steps back down to one, but just remember, we can adjust our size of this

with our min value, so with our first normal based light, it's pretty easy to just add to this, we can

just take those three nodes there, go Control Shift and D so that they maintain connections

and then we'll just replace this connection here with the new one and then what we can do is plug

the output of the first normal base light into the first socket and then Control Shift click on that

node to see the results. now what we can do is set our light color so let's just take that all the

way up to white and the position of it is exactly the same as the other position at the moment, so

let's left click and drag on here to replace it somewhere and clearly this isn't looking quite

right, so what we need to do is instead of having mix, we're going to set that to Add and then now we

have essentially two lights for which to play with. now one option that we've got and it's the way i'm

going to go with this, is i'm going to switch these around, so i'm going to go Shift A and add in an

input rgb and Ctrl C and Control C to paste that in and then i'm going to left click and drag from

that bottom one, move it to the top and i'm going to left click and drag this one over to the bottom

and in this kind of way this is like instead of painting the actual light, it's sort of like

we're painting the shadow, we don't have to flip it around, we could just change the min position,

but i wanted to show there's another way we can think about this as casting darkness and not

necessarily always is casting light on this first normal based set of nodes we're creating here

with that done again, we can move these over and simply take these again and go Ctrl Shift and D

one more time, duplicate those up and then kind of daisy chain this, so i'm going to redirect the

output of this put that into the first socket here and then unplug that and then Ctrl Shift

click on this node here, again let's make sure this is kind of bright white and this can serve as our

kind of highlight, so i can move this around here and let's take the min value up here just to make

it like a little dot and now we've kind of fixed a little bit of a highlight on there, now we don't

actually have to just take the normal output of this for a highlight, what i'm going to do instead

is duplicate this with Shift D and raise it up just to make it cleaner and then i'm going to use

the reflection output to inform this, that way it should move around based on the camera angle which

is more what i want for this and then i'm going to go Ctrl H and clean that up by collapsing that

down to just what we're using, same here, Shift right click and drag across there just to make

an extra reroute node, making it easier to plug something into here if we wanted, but from there

it would just be a matter of adjusting size and playing with these directions and colors and again

we can flip these around if we want this to behave more as a light rather than reflected shadow, but

just goes to show there is a reasonable amount of versatility in the ways that we can approach this.