2d Cartoon RimLighting in Blender

Support Materials and Textures
1

So I have been using a trick to get 2d characters to work in a 3d world.

By using the alpha channel of the 2d animation and offsetting it you can get a nice rim lighting for free!

Normally I do this in after effects when comping the characters in.

But for this next project I would like to import the 2d animation as a plane and have the rim lighting
work as an eevee shader.

And I need some more reliable way to warp the UV “away” from the illumination to get the nice sharp rim.

Right now I am just useing a shader to rgb node to subtract some of the uv color, but it doesn’t work very well.

After effects also has radial bluring that I would like to find some way to emulate. for self shadowing

2

Why don’t you use Grease pencil property tab: Effects: Rim light?

3

I didn’t know grease Pencil had a rim lighting that’s pretty neat!

However the character animation is being done in Harmony not blender and I need to be able to work with it as an image sequence.

I have done a little more testing and I am getting some okay results.

4

Hello form the future ! Can you share your setup for this ? I’m trying to make 2D rigs using flat objects and running into the same problem you had. Thanks in advance !

5

Never got a good solution working, matte the characters and use compositing.

The above one abuses the shader to rgb node and only works in Eevee. For images on planes.

If you are making 2d shapes and the shapes aren’t changing I would paint the rim normals and use those on the shapes.

Split this out to a new post with some pictures and I’ll give you some more input

1 Like
6

Thanks a lot for replying !

Here’s my new post, I just added some pics and attachments :