Hi
I am here again with another .hack fanart. This time it is Cello from the .hack//LINK RPG game. This was done as a sculpting and lighting exercise for anime characters. I tried to make it as close as possible to the original illustration.
Sculpted in Zbrushcore and rendered with Blender 2.79 using the internal render engine.
C&C is always welcome.
6 Likes
this is really amazing man !!!
can you show us the light setting and te color setup ?!!!
Really great job! I know it’s hard to make toon shading look just right, so you’ve done a fantastic job. 
@alf0 & @ArtAvenue
Thank you for the kind words.
Because of how the character shading is setup in the reference image, it was almost impossible to light the entire character with a single light source. I had to therefore separate the parts into their own layers with dedicated spotlights set to affect only that layer.
The material is the same that I used on the last character. Just plain toon shader for the diffuse and specular parts. I used a color ramp set to ‘constant’ to get sharp transition between the areas of light and shadow and adjusted the spot lamp position to match the lighting to the reference image. Once I was satisfied with the lighting, I simply plugged in the vertex colors that I painted in Zbrushcore and I was done.
For the outline, I did an edge only pass for the entire model and then separate passes for individual parts to get internal edges. These were then composited in the compositor with little manipulation to get the desired edge quality.
The model has about 13 million polygons but it renders under 5 mins given the simple shader and lighting setup. I will miss Blender internal so much for rendering anime models. Time to move on to Evee now…
Please let me know if you need further explanation on any part. Would be glad to help.
material setup
light setup
1 Like
wow this is a very colplaxe setup
i am not sure if it will be easy to be used on animation projects, but the ending result are amazing