How to Create a Toon Shaded Effect in Blender

Jonathan Williamson on Sep 30th 2009 with 15 comments

In this beginner/ intermediate level tutorial, we are going to take a look at creating a simple toon shaded render for our characters in blender. Among the topics that will be covered are: basic lighting, creating and adjusting the toon materials, rendering, and composite nodes.

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By Jonathan Williamson

Rollover to read this author's bio or click through to see a full list of posts by this author.

Jonathan has been very active in the blender community over the years, and his main focus is character modeling and design. He has helped to organize and present two blender conferences in Montreal, one blender conference in New York, and returned two consecutive years to North Carolina, to teach alongside fellow Blender-artists at a Summer camp for junior-high students hosted by Red Hat Linux. He has also been featured in two publications on Blender, and worked to pass on the skills he has learned by producing training materials on his own as well. You can see some samples of his Blender art on his site at: www.montagestudio.org.  

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Discussion 15 Comments

  1. khan says:
    September 30, 2009 at 7:03 am

    cool

    Reply
  2. Web 2.0 says:
    September 30, 2009 at 11:53 am

    Nice tutorial, great work…

    Reply
  3. Craigsnedeker says:
    September 30, 2009 at 2:28 pm

    heh looks great!

    Reply
  4. DJ says:
    September 30, 2009 at 7:25 pm

    Seemed good but didn’t have the time to set and wait for it to keep catching up. You must use a different codec than all the others have used. I’ve never had that kind of problem with any other tut on nettuts – so don’t think it’s MY machine.

    Reply
  5. Jonathan Williamson says:
    October 1, 2009 at 12:24 pm
    Author

    @DJ, did you have this same problem with my Retopology tutorial?

    http://cg.tutsplus.com/tutorials/3d-art/re-topologize-a-game-ready-alien-head-in-blender/

    Reply
  6. AzteKpr1de says:
    October 8, 2009 at 5:44 pm

    This is just awesome! I was wondering how to make this effect…

    Reply
  7. Nixon says:
    November 3, 2009 at 6:57 am

    heya Jonathan,

    can this setup be applied to a whole scene by any chance?:)
    dunno if u still read along since i’m kinda late with this.
    Thx in advance for any comment:)
    Best regards

    Reply
  8. chaosvoider says:
    March 29, 2010 at 4:57 pm

    Wow, that is WAY cool!! I might try that as soon as I make a model! I always wondered how they did that cell-shading thing in Wind Waker…

    Reply
  9. Eliana says:
    May 22, 2010 at 12:56 am

    Hello, and thank you so much for posting these tutorials, they’ve helped me more than this book I bought, and more than other tutorials I’ve seen. @_@

    I have a question though, I’m working on my first model, and when I saved it, all the pieces got glued together, so when I colored it, I could only use one color. Is there a way of fixing this like separating the pieces by layers, or can I color it over like any Photoshop drawing? Thank you so much! =D

    Reply
    • Newbosity_squared says:
      June 20, 2010 at 12:24 am

      Eliana,

      Here’s a quick little video tutorial that might help you with assigning multiple materials to a single mesh.
      ( I originally meant to write out the instructions for you, but it took a lot of typing to explain a simple thing.)

      Link to the tutorial, on YouTube: [URL] http://www.youtube.com/watch#!v=lRXokcWfBr8&feature=related [URL]

      There’s No need to separate your model into different layers, etc.

      Best wishes, and happy Blending. :)

      Reply
  10. Strony Internetowe Kraków says:
    May 23, 2010 at 7:54 pm

    Thanks for your work, very nice effect to get in blender.

    Reply
  11. MegaFracture says:
    April 9, 2011 at 11:27 am

    your Edges won’t work with animations but if you go into the scripts of the existing edge modifier you can tweak down the strength. just google how to do so. it’s simple once in the script it’s just finding the script was the hard part

    Reply

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