All language subtitles for A_15_Toon Flat

Toon shading! toon as in cartoon although some
people might prefer using those labels to mean

different things and so keep the toon and
cartoons apart as specialist's descriptors

different categories in their own right, i
think it's always best to check everyone's

on the same page when it comes to terminology,
so without getting into the origins of the word,

i think we can look at what it means in the
relatively modern and most common use cases,

we're usually talking about 3d shaders made to
emulate hand-drawn and colored 2d animation like

Mickey Mouse is as a very early example, Bugs Bunny
the Flintstones films like the Little Mermaid

the Simpsons and animes such as One Punch Man, My
Neighbor Totoro and Akira, all super influential

in their own way and the list could go on and on,
there are plenty of tooned styles out there but

also plenty that bind the styles together, we're
going to start pretty simple and work from there

especially the first five examples here, as apart
from the backgrounds that tend to get a bit more

shading in the main characters and foreground action
tend to be almost completely shadeless, taking the

yellow skin of Homer Simpson as an example, notice
that it's just one flat single shade of yellow,

nothing in the shading is telling us about how
three-dimensional the forms are intended to be,

but yet we can still interpret in this case easily
what's going on. we'll come back to why that is in

a moment, anyway we can see from this example that
toon shader could be just a simple flat color

which is a good place to start and really easy
to set up in Blender. i'm going to start with this

cool octopus robot alien scene by Manu, there's a
bunch of different materials on here so i'm going

to cut to a scene where every object is just
using the same material and also i'll enable

Use Nodes for this in the shader editor. currently
everything is going to go black because all it is

at the moment is just this material output with
nothing plugged in and also was switched over to

Eevee since it was set to Cycles a moment ago and
to achieve our flat shading all we need to do is

go Shift A and add in an Emission shader and then
once we plug that into the surface we're gonna get

that flash shading of whatever color we choose,
with Eevee, that's just fine, we can consider it done

we actually don't even need the Emission shader,
we can actually just plug in an RGB value instead

and Blender will understand that the only way this
is going to work is to interpret that as a kind of

Emission shader, it's just we don't really have
the strength setting, but usually i like using an

emission shader just so that it's clear exactly
what's going on, this is emitting light into the

scene, which is fine and dandy for Eevee, we can add
in a plane here for example to scale that right up

and in Eevee that's perfectly fine, but since these
are Emission shaders if we switch over to Cycles

we're gonna start seeing that Emission starting
to emit into the scene which if for some reason

you're mixing the non-photoreal cartoony world
with the all singing and dancing perks of a path

tracing realistic lighting engine like Cycles,
then you might want to limit the emission onto

the surrounding environment, luckily that's easy
to do with a light path node. let's go Shift A

input, light path, and then also we'll add in a mix
shader and drop that in just before the material

output and then all we need to do is say if it's
a camera array that is to say if the camera can

see it, then we're going to use an emission shader,
so if we get white out of here we're going to get

the second socket, so let's switch that in there
and if it's not a camera ray then we're going to

use whatever's in the first socket which in this
case is actually nothing. so we get none of that

additional emission into the scene and just to
clean things up a little bit, we can just go Ctrl H

to collapse that down. it's hard not to notice
though at this point that with just a flat color

what we're looking at becomes very hard to read,
but yeah we said a moment ago that even a flat

shadeless color is still enough to interpret
what's going on visually, so what else do we

need, well it's probably quite obvious what we're
missing and what a big part of the puzzle actually

is :) these examples are making use of contrasting
outlines to help separate the forms. without the

outlines and with just that flat shading, we've
lost too much detail to properly make sense of

what we're looking at, we're going to go over
outlines in a separate chapter but i'm going

to include one of the main available methods to us
right here and now in this chapter, so jumping back

to this .blend file here, i'm going to switch from
Cycles back over to Eevee and the main method we're

going to cover right here is generally referred to
as the inverse hull method so with this particular

object selected doesn't really matter which object
though i'm going to come over to the modifiers and

i'm going to give this a Solidifier modifier. with
the cursor in the 3d view i'm going to hit /

on the numpad so that we can just take a look at
this one object very cleanly and switch over to

solid view for a moment, so the solidify is going
to give some thickness like a shell to all the

faces on our object here and what we can do is we
can specify a different material for all of these

new faces, so let's come over to our shading menu
and take a look at slot 2 and then what we'll do

is click the little 402 there since 402 objects
were using that material, now we have an exclusive

one, so this is the only object using this now
and we'll just call this outline, for this just

for simplicity let's just change our emission color
down to something pretty close to black and then

now let's take another look at our rendered view,
now we can't see anything at the moment so what

we'll do is we'll tell the Solidify modifier that
we're using our second material in the slot, so if

we want to see in this view as well we can just
see that our outline is the second slot in our

material list there, in code it usually starts
counting at zero, so this one's going to be zero

this one's going to be one, so when we come back
over to our Solidify modifier we can set our

materials to be one, which is the second material
our outline material in slot 2, but that doesn't

look quite right, although at least we can see it
now, the other part of the puzzle is to simply flip

the normals of the faces, the new faces that are
being created there, now by default a material

won't have backface culling on and so we're going
to need to set that in our material, so if we just

find our backface culling setting in the settings,
we're going to enable that and now we're starting

to get something which looks a little bit more
like an outline, to get this to work properly we're

going to want to apply any scale, so i'm going
to go Ctrl A and apply that scale we'll see a

little adjustment there. and then it's just going
to be a matter of tweaking our thickness setting

to get an outline thickness that we like, one other
thing that i just like to check is to tab into the

object, select everything with A and then come back
over to the material and just check that all these

faces have this material assigned so with that
selected i'm going to click assign that's looking

pretty good for the most part, something else
that we need to check is our material direction

so with this one i'm also going to set the back
face culling on and i saw something change in

the viewport there, so i think that not all of our
faces are facing the correct way, so i'm going to

tab into edit mode again, Alt N to bring up our
normals and we can recalculate outside or try

recalculating inside which is not quite right
but that's pretty cool, so i'm going to go Alt

N and just recalculate outside, so this method
isn't going to be perfect but as we can see it

actually does get us a lot of the way there, whilst
talking about outlying, something that i wanted to

insert here just because it seems like the most
logical place to put it, is that there's one last

thing we can do to our outline material and it's
not really going to matter in this setup, because

we're just using an emission shader, but if we
did want to change the setup so that we are using

more lighting and not just emission like this
we're going to want to come down to our material

settings and turn the shadow mode to none. as you
can see nothing happens in the view at the moment

because we're not say using a diffuse texture
instead, basically we don't want the extra geometry

that we're creating to use for our outline to be
considered when casting shadows on our objects, so

that's one object done, we don't want to have to
do that to these other 400, one by one at least,

so let's go Shift G and select all off type, so all
other geometry objects in other words and shift

select this one just make sure this one that we've
already done is the correct active object and then

if we head over to our preferences and take a look
at our add-ons and just make sure we have our copy

attributes add-on enabled, that's going to enable
us to now go Ctrl C and copy a selected modifier

because we don't want to select a mirror modifier
or anything like that and place that on objects

that don't need that and it looks like it's only
giving us a subsurf option here, so i don't have

the correct object selected actually, so let's try
that again plane.005 needs to be our active object

Shift G type plane.005 is still our active object
so Ctrl C copy selected modifiers and then the

solidify modifier and then click ok. so that's done
but we can see that we actually don't have much in

the way of outlines and that's because we haven't
given it the material either, so Shift Alt and Z

just to bring all the wireframes back again and
then go Ctrl L and then we're going to link the

materials, with that done that's looking much
better, but i'm going to tab into edit mode again

select everything with A and click assign, i'm also
going to go Alt N and we're going to recalculate

outside, that's made some changes, i'm also going to
tab into object mode to apply the scale, but we'll

find that we can't do that for instanced objects
but i'm fine with that as there's only a couple

of objects standing out as issues at the moment,
so let's tackle those one by one, so i'm going to

select this piece, go Ctrl A, apply the scale, but
we're still getting quite a lot of black on this

let's come over to the modifier and just tweak
the thickness there until it looks about right

occasionally you might have an object like this,
which if we turn off the solidify modifier can

actually see through to the sky, so this isn't
an enclosed mesh like say a cube might be,

so what i'm going to do is actually add another
Solidify modifier first, just to fix this, so this

is our new solidify modifier, i'm just going to
click and drag it before our outlines and use

the default settings and then if we re-enable uh
outline solidifier modifier we see it's looking

a lot more like we might expect, so let's /
on the numpad back out of there and we can see

if we just take a more simpler background here,
let's just blur it quite a lot and go Shift

Alt and Z just to get rid of any other little
helpers in the scene, we can see that this is way

more readable now, might not be perfect and some
things might need its own individual tweaking to

various different thicknesses, like maybe we want
to make the tentacles more prominent, we might want

to increase our thicknesses, in fact if we select
two objects at once so i've shift selected these

two tentacles on this side, we can hold down Alt
take it up to something we might like to try like

0.5 or hold Alt while sliding and we'll be
able to affect both of them at the same time,

so i think that's looking way more readable now
and we'll explore the topic of outlines a bit

more in another chapter, before we move on from the
super simple shading though, let's not overlook one

of the most simplest and performant options that
may in some situations be enough to get the point

across, we switch over to the render engine section
and we can see we've got a workbench as an option,

we can essentially get the workbench shading
options in our solid shading view, so i'm just

going to switch that over there, and then click
on the arrow to show some pull down information

and over in the lighting area we can switch that
to flat and thankfully because we have our outline

enabled we even get some outlines in the mix, just
going to go ctrl space to go full screen on this

now there is a section in the preferences
where we can find our themes and the 3d

viewport and at the bottom of this we will find
a section to do with outline width, but that's

referring to the outlines of the selected, so
if we just turn on our viewport overlays there

it's referring to this orange outline here, so
there's only so much we can do with this method

really and also it's not especially clean how we
would separate things, but if i just add in a cube

here to just demonstrate something, let's scale
that up a little bit, rotate it around, we can see

it's separated from the background there, this
plane that we've placed on the ground, but if i

was to take this face here and press Y to separate
it and just move it off slightly and press Tab to

get back into object mode, we can see there's
still no separation there what we'd simply

need to do there is to press P to separate
it into a separate object and then we'd be

able to see the separation and that's what
we can see here, the outlines are showing us

that this for example is its own object, which we
can select, we don't need to just have white of

course we can give each object its own colour, so
if we go Ctrl Space we can go over to the object

settings and find our viewport display and there's
a color right there and now we can see that stands

out so we can color things on a per object level
or we can give everything a random color and we

have these other options of course, we also have
a vertex option, which is something i'm going to

come back to in a moment and i'm also going to
press the Backspace on that color just to reset

that back to default and just before we move
on from this section i'm just going to point

out that there are shadows available, so we can
switch this on and the little cog icon is going

to give us some extra settings there, we've got the
shadow focus at the bottom and the higher we crank

that the cleaner the or the harsher the fall off
becomes, so it's just a flat line, this is much more

typical of toon shading, we've also got the ability
to shift the shadow in a few places as well as

left click and drag on this sphere that we
have to completely change the direction, so

we can see in some cases this in of itself
could make some decent tune rendering.