Looking for a way to achieve toon specled shading

Hi all,

I’m new to the forum and to blender pretty much.
I have an animation project I thought about migrating to blender, but I was wondering about the technique. So basically what I would like is to be able to achieve an illustration feeling involving speckled shading (in the general area of whats in the picture below), but in 3D with models and not by illustrating and working 2d. So I know blender has toon shaders but I was wondering if it would be possible to achieve something of the sort. Thanks for the help.



One way to try is with Cel shading techniques and a texture.

Made a silly Suzanne and a quick material to show one way, which is at the left hand side of the nodes. There’s a sun lamp in the scene and its soft size has been adjusted. A dot product of the light vector and the model normals give a grayscale mask on the model (left viewport) that can be used in various ways to mix in colors and in this case, a texture.


Silly Suzanne doesn’t actually have shading on it, it’s a shadeless material, a flat color. The end result is a mix of colors and the texture, based on the light direction. From left in the top viewport: light, adjusted light (power), base color, shadow color, highlight color, glossiness, and the mix. Used vertex colors for those.

In the example case just one color would be enough and then modulate those with a texture, based on a mask. That mask could be a light direction like above, or you could paint one directly on the model, could separate texture coordinates to get a directional mask, and so on.

Might not want to simply multiply the colors like I did, unless it’s emulating a black marker. Hue shifting and adjusting saturation gives more life to it.


another way would be to use 2.79 toon shader node
see if this can work for you taste !

happy cl