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Toon Shading - Cycles Caustics

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Thursday, March 30, 2017 Under: Tutorials
Hey all!

Super glad to be able to get this video done. I have quite a story behind this one that I know you are gonna luv reading, so to prevent the temptation of watching first, the tutorial is at the bottom of the post.

Why cover caustics in Cycles when it was done in Blender Render already?
   A fairly obvious question to those who use Cycles, but not to everyone. Cycles is a newer engine in Blender and is built for realism. This makes things like toon-style NPR extremely difficult. Styles like Disney uses with Pixar movies shouldn't be a problem, but preventing something built for realism to be realistic is a challenge!

What makes it so hard?
   Cycles has all sorts of interactions that happens when objects come into close proximity and other things that want to move away from toon shading - not to mention things like energy loss when you increase the diffuse size even with the toon shader.
   On top of physical rules that govern it, we also don't have all the textures we have access to in Blender Render. Now we could reason all day that it doesn't matter, but for toon shading, it definitely matters! hahaha.
Caustics work extremely well in toon shading, with the Distorted Noise texture from Blender Render. You can think of it as, possibly the best texture for the job. There is only an extremely basic Voronoi texture in Cycles and you can't even sharpen it enough to get that Voronoi Crackle look. I think it was dumped for it's lack of general use. We also lack distortion category of nodes and a few other features that make Blender Render super flexible for toon shading.

Why Cycles then, if it's not suited?
   This can be summed up in one thing: Render Time. Cycles has support for GPU rendering, making it an extremely attractive alternative to the CPU-only render of Blender Render. Personally, I don't have the best card, so my CPU is faster anyway, helping me stick with Blender Render, haha.

Why this video then?
   Well, as hard as it may be to believe, I am not the only person on the internet, nor the only person that uses blender, hahaha. There are many people out there who want to do toon shading, who have a much better card than I do and want to use Cycles for it. This video is primarily for that user base. Believe it or not, my most popular video to date is the Toon Shading in Cycles video. There is a need for it.
   Also, when I shared the last tutorial, a friend from a G+ community asked me if I had any Cycles videos and I only had 4 to share - which isn't much. I then wanted to say that the other tutorials can be interpolated for Cycles at which point the HOLY SPIRIT stopped me from saying it and told me to make a tutorial on water. I had no idea what kind of water or whatever, but later in the day HE told me it would be for caustics and so
this is the new Cycles toon shading tip! :D


If this tutorial helped you, thank JESUS for it, because HE's the ONE that insisted on it and told me what to make!

Know JESUS yet?
http://www.crossallegiance.org/knowJesus.html

Have a great one!!!

Thank YOU!!!!!!

In : Tutorials 


Tags: god  jesus  holy spirit  blender  anime  cycles  toon shading  npr  quick  tip 
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