Hello! I have only been using blender for about two years, and there is still so much to learn! I was wondering if you guys had any cool ideas about shaders and materials for cartoon characters. My characters are not too cartoony or too realistic. They are loosely inspired off of nintendo or crash bandicoot characters. That is, I don’t know if they will need outlines or photorealistic shading or not. I am going to do a few cycles renders to test which node setups are the best for my characters. I am quite open to experimenting with it. I just wanted to pick your brains for what kinds of nodes and materials might look cool. You guys always have neat ideas!
I’ve been playing around with these types for a while. My favorite of my own, while simple, is this
5 shades for lighting, the 5th being my shade for shadows, with the light sources themselves shadeless. I created a duplicate material with white specular highlights and applied it only to the edges I wanted to show up - specifically none of the larger planes. I used a simple freestyle setting to outline everything with a few gaps here and there. I’m not 100% happy with the curved lighting transitions on the floor or the lack of color, but I wanted it to be as quick to put together as possible.
However I like the work others are doing, especially with added details like hatching and other effects, like this guys manga shader: www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8PlDvt76VI&feature=emb_logo
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I think hatching and lines like this are really cool
But this is more comic style than cartoon I guess. (from here: https://artis.imag.fr/Members/Cyril.Soler/DEA/NonPhotoRealisticRendering/Papers/p581-praun.pdf)
Apologies for the double post but as a new user my posts can only contain two links and I wanted to include where it came from. Interested to see any other non photo realistic styles.
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I understand that you had to post it twice, I’ve had to do that to a few times. That is some very cool stuff right there! I really like the curved transitions you have there actually! It makes it look more organic. I think I might try something like that, it’s very interesting. There’s just so much to explore in blender. I think you are very cool and talented! Thank you so much for sharing your ideas with me, and taking the time to read my post here. Godbless!