17.8. Cartoon Edges

Relevant to Blender v2.31

Blender's new material shaders, as per version 2.28, include nice toon diffuse and specular shaders.

By using these shaders you can give your rendering a comic-book-like or manga-like appearance, affecting the shades of colours, as you may be able to appreciate in Figure 17-31.

Figure 17-31. A scene with Toon materials.

The effect is not perfect since real comics and manga also usually have china ink outlines. Blender can add this feature as a post-processing operation.

To access this option select the Edge button in the Output Panel of the Rendering (F10) Buttons (Figure 17-32). This makes Blender search for edges in your rendering and add an 'outline' to them.

Figure 17-32. Toon edge buttons.

Before repeating the rendering it is necessary to set some parameters. The Edge Settings opens a window to set these (Figure 17-33).

Figure 17-33. Toon edge settings.

In this window it is possible to set the edge colour, which is black by default, and its intensity, Eint which is an integer ranging from 0 (faintest) to 255 (strongest). The other buttons are useful if the Unified render is used (see next section).

Figure 17-34 shows the same image as Figure 17-31 but with toon edges enabled, of black colour and maximum intensity (Eint=255).

Figure 17-34. Scene re-rendered with toon edge set.