Greetings, I’ve recently come from the ‘dark’ side of the 3D force and jumped feet first into Blender. Of course, I’ve brought a bunch of my ‘actors’ with me
Pretty simple material, a ramp on the diffuse gives the toon-shading, the ‘sketch’ effect is done with a displace modifier driven by a perlin noise texture which cycles once per frame, rendered with Sampled Motion Blur, 5 samples, and a very tight shutter 0.02 frames to prevent ‘ghosting’ effect when I animate this. This method is derived from Issac Botkin’s “Painting with Polygons” technique (which seems to have been taken down from his site…) Anyways a lot of tweaking and adjusting vertex weights for the displace modifier and it’s finally giving a look I’m happy with A quick compositing ‘trick’ with the ground plane in a separate render layer with ‘edge’ turned off to remove an annoying edge that it was tracing.
I’m using edge for the layer with the character; for the toon shading I prefer to use a ramp, it gives better control over the placement of the ‘toon levels’ as well you can soften the boundaries between ‘levels’ just a little bit as well.
The character has a displace modifier (before Edge Split… which is important if you want to keep all the ‘parts’ of your mesh together) which is driven by a noise texture which I’ve named ‘HF Body’. Set an IPO at -1 frames and at 0 frames, and set it to cycle. Now notice the crazy spikey sawtooth pattern of the waveform there, that’s because the Shutter of Sampled Motion Blur is set to 0.02 frames: I want the displace to ‘wiggle’ the mesh 5 times every frame, and to get a significant amount of motion it needs a very fast change in the Size of the texture, during that 0.02 frame period. Setting it to Cycle causes it to repeat the exact same displacement every frame, so you get the exact same ‘sketch’ effect on the mesh every frame. Start it at -1 frames otherwise the mesh will “pop” from frame 0 to frame 1 Oh yes, notice the rotate gizmo, that’s actually the origin of the actor’s mesh, the displace seems to fall off closer to the origin of the object, so I had to offset this to get it to work properly, luckily this doesn’t affect the armature at all.
