Anime Model Updating

[animate1978]

So I have been doing a lot of thinking and realized that the Anime characters have gotten very very little love from me or anyone for years and I think it is time for an update!

Right now I am just talking the shader, which is decent but is not really as good as it can be. I did some searching in the interwebs and found a cel shader that was created by a mod on BlenderArtists.org and just from what I have SEEN looks pretty decent as well, plus I think he would love the fact that his shader is in the addon.

So I have begun progress on developing a new shader based around this shader which is called ' ucss '
It is not easy, the shader inputs and outputs are many so plugging it into MB-Lab will not be a trivial matter. Right now I am not sure exactly how to do it so I am experimenting and seeing what works, what doesn't.

Mind you this is totally not my realm, I haven't had a lot of experience with this form of rendering method.

[animate1978]

Well so far after a lot of experimentation and seeing what I could come up with I have at least the start of a working solution to the anime shader.

One of the primary reasons for this change is that the current shader does not react to light, not at all. So this becomes a problem when people want to place them in scenes with lighting, regardless of using NPR rendering lighting does play an important part. It is true that the lighting is not as intricate to work with, meaning that there isn't a million light bounces affecting different areas of the scene, so working with it can be easier, in theory in my mind that is. I don't know. Anyways, the UCSS shader reacts to lighting so this allows for placing into scenes with lights and getting an emotional response.

This is what I have so far.What I have kept is the Hue/Sat/Val node group, everything else is tossed aside. What I have done is appended the UCSS shader into this test file and then added some value nodes for the new controls. The old controls are either getting rerouted to similar operations or removed, depending on the situation. The outputs of the UCSS node group go to Color Mix nodes that get pumped to the EEVEE output directly (which tends to work best with this) and a Toon BSDF node for Cycles (otherwise it renders flat).

Still more work ahead but making some great progress!