Anyone know how to get a Cycles toon shader and an image texture to play nice together?

Support Materials and Textures
1

I’m trying to add some hand-drawn details to my cartoon character in photoshop. I’m matching the solid color of the toon shader with my base color in photoshop, but when I plug an image file into the toon shader node It appears blown out on the surface of the model.

Settings:
Toon shader applied to model
Lightpath tabs are all set to zero.
Ambient occlusion is on with distance set to zero.
single light source. Sunlamp with the size set to 0.001 for hard shadows.
Film exposure set at 2.0

Here are some images. I have two simple shader networks here.

The first is with a simple Toon shader being piped into the surface slot. This is the color I want to use as my base color in photoshop and add detail on top of.

Just%20toon%20shader
Just%20toon%20shader1904×1001 295 KB

The second image is of an image texture node connecting to the toon shader and then to the surface slot. It’s a photoshop image containing the same color as the other shader, it’s just an image file instead. It’s all blown out. Why?

Image%20texture%20with%20toon%20shader
Image%20texture%20with%20toon%20shader1904×1001 287 KB

I’ve tried using the gamma node and the brightness node to adjust the brightness back to the original color. They reduce the brightness but they don’t give me the original color back.

Any help would appricated.
Thanks so much

2

happy cl

3

Thanks for the post RickyBlender. This is a good tutorial for covering basic color only toon shading but I need to be able to use a custom texture map coming in via image node with a toon shader. Any Ideas there?

Thanks,
Ryan

4

I did not experiment a lot with this shader
which is more like a cartoon render I guess

depends how you use the toon shader
you can add an image texture but then it will become a mix of the 2
so might not give a toon look anymore!

may be some one else can give more feedback on this subject!

happy cl

5

I think without putting anything on the vector input of the image Blender is just taking the colour at (0,0) from the image, which is white in your case. Did you try to UV unwrap?

6

The model does have UVs. And, I went back and added a texture coordinate node with UV pipped into the vector input of the image node just in case. It didn’t make any difference in the color of the character. Thank you for the suggestion though.

7

Millani is correct, though.

I think something might not be right with the UVs.

One quick way to check is to go to the image/UV window, switch to the texture (i.e. not the render), then select your model and enter edit mode.

Then you should be able to see how well your UVs are placed over your image texture.

If something’s off, you might try unwrapping a different way - for example, from front of model in view going with the UV - Project from View option.

And the image texture should have a UV vector input :slight_smile:

Best of luck with your project!