So I was basically just wondering how do you achieve the 3D cartoon style/look in renders. And I don’t mean like the toon shaders, I am talking about the style that still looks 3D and kind of realistic but has a cartoony feel. The style used by Dreamworks and Pixar, etc.
Heres some examples of the style I am talking about:
In all of these images, it looks like it still has many realistic stuff when it comes to textures and lighting, it looks like it all uses roughness, reflection, bump, normal, and all that stuff. The things a lot of people recommend for realistic renders. But I don’t get what makes them look cartoony while still having a realistic feel. Is it the modeling (cartoony modeling that makes the big difference)? Are they doing something different with the lighting and texturing? What separates these 3D cartoon looking renders from looking too realistic and what is done to not make it look too realistic but maintain the 3D cartoon style?
Basically, I would say that it comes from modelling.
Let’s have a look on the image you just joined :
As you can see, shapes are very simple. The nose, the mouth, the eyes, etc…
In addition, (and that would be the same for drawings) the proportions are very different. Even if the lighting and rendering look “realistic” eyes are MUCH bigger than real life, etc…
Thanks so much! Seems like an incredible community and I hope to participate here every day to improve my blender skills!
I also kind of noticed the modeling aspect but I am starting to think its a combination of multiple different things combined.
The cartoony modeling. I think it also has to do with texturing too where the environment seems to look much more realistic than the characters. I will try to experiment with that and see if real people can match the scene. But I don’t think the background of a scene is to different from a realistic attempted version. But I have noticed some studios reduce the detail every now and then, I definitely notice a variation in this style used in different films.
It’s detail and scale. For examples they modeled a house with bigger rocks, but still a realistic detailed texture. You can play with both and get different results.
Now, if you’re truly going for a cartoon feel, you might purposely omit things like SSS because you want the character’s skin tone to look “ink and paint.” You might instead want to go for some of the visual tricks that 2D animators use to give their characters a sense of “depth.” It’s really up to you.
Funny somehow that all the answers I can see seem to focus on technical stuff, like SSS, while in fact that look results from a consequent and very skillful application of artistic experience about key visual elements in animated characters, how proportions and individual characteristics are exaggerated best, what to show and what to omit … in short, the result of about a century of animation in 2D and nowadays 3D. All that is built on top of thorough understanding of proportions, anatomy, dynamics of shapes, it emerged in 2D as an abstraction and simplification of realworld 3D realism suitable to capture us on an emotional level, and since a couple of decades it is now translated back into virtual 3D.
You can’t approach that from a technical perspective alone, you need to understand the artistic principles first, otherwise you won’t get anywhere with that kind of stylization.
Hello a very new and very inexperiencd Blender user here, but I’ve watched lots of videos about VFX, rendering, 3D etc. Basically subsurface scattering helps simulate the light that would pass through a certain material. Because there’s always a small amount of light that penetrates, at least in the case of human skin. For example if a head is lit with 1 lamp, the lit part would be bright, the unlit part would be dark, but inbetween there would be a little spot where there’s a little red-ish glow, that show’s that the light passes a bit through the material. For example if you put a flashlight under your finger or behind your ear, your ear or your finger will not totally block and absorb the light, some of it will be blocked but some of it will pass through, making the skin there red or red-ish, depending on how much light passes through. This makes a huge difference in making things look realistic. If I remember correctly there was this one ad, where they made a model of Bruce Lee and when the scene had more light, his skin looked plastic af, that’s because they didn’t do the subsurface scattering correctly or at all. This is my understanding of subsurface scattering. Hope it helps you understand it too
Yes, that’s a pretty good description. The question is whether you want to use that in what you say is a “cartoon style” render. Probably, I think, you would not. You’d pay close attention to the materials particularly with regard to specularity.
Over the years there have been many examples posted here of both artwork and animation that “definitely looked like a cartoon” but which was generated using 3D.
Even in the 3D world, we still use certain throwbacks to 2D technique – such as “extremely big eyes.” The eyes in most animation characters (e.g. Disney® Anything …) would be about the size of a hen’s egg, and the nose is generally reduced to maintain proportion. But much human emotion is conveyed through the eyes and eyebrows, so that’s why it’s done.
You’d indeed do very well to study such 2D animation textbooks as the definitive The Illusion of Life.
