4

I know It's possible to do this with solidify modifier, or manually duplicating the mesh, fatten and flip normals (which is more or less the same thing as the solidify method). Like this one

enter image description here enter image description here

And I want it to be rendered realtime in viewport. So no freestyle.

Blender has a rich shading system. So I wonder If the outline effect can be created only with shader nodes.

It would be nice to not have to solidify every object in the scene and add aditional geometry to the objects.

susu
  • 14,002
  • 3
  • 25
  • 48
np20
  • 61
  • 1
  • 4
  • 1
    something like this? https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/28422/how-to-render-a-mesh-transparent-with-a-color-on-its-edges-only-with-nodes – susu Aug 27 '20 at 14:30
  • Hello, Cycles or Eevee ? – Gorgious Aug 27 '20 at 15:01
  • That style of outlining requires additional geometry-- either as an additional object, or as a duplicated mesh in the same object, with its own material. (Can use material displacement.) To automate it, you'd have to use something like Animation Nodes addon. – Nathan Aug 27 '20 at 15:48
  • I edited my question. So It's impossible with only shaders? – np20 Aug 27 '20 at 16:23
  • This should be possible with just shaders, but it depends on how limited Blender's shading system is. –  Aug 27 '20 at 17:14
  • To expand on my earlier comment, you want to do a second render pass over the same material, except with flipped faces (only works with backface culling turned ON). Extrude the vertices outwards by their normals. Then make the newly created faces all black. Outline shaders are possibly in Unity and they definitely oughta be in Blender. –  Aug 27 '20 at 17:15
  • With geometry nodes' "join" function, from object or collection, this is much easier to do with geometry than when you asked the question. You can make a new object that instances any or all of your collections, then displace it and assign it a single material. You can have a single, scene-wide "outline" object that you can edit with further modifiers (for instance, to do a single-pixel-thick edge) and can disable in viewports for when you don't want to double your vert count. – Nathan May 22 '21 at 18:42

2 Answers2

6

Blender 2.93 now has LineArt Grease Pencil built in! Edit: Blender 2.93 is now stable and officially released! But I think Beer/Malt renderer is still in development afaik.

To add toonlines, press:

  • Shift+A > Grease Pencil > Pick a LineArt option. I use Scene LineArt. enter image description here

This adds a Grease Pencil object. You can select it and go to modifiers to change line thickness and other settings.

Note that you have to look through camera view to see the outlines lined up properly. If you want to orbit the camera around like the viewport:

  • Press N-key to open up the side panel on the right
  • Click the View tab.
  • Checkmark Lock > Camera to View. enter image description here

It's real-time on my slow old PC, but things start to slow down for me at higher vert counts. To get rid of lag, try this:

enter image description here

It works in any viewport (solid, material, eevee, etc.). EDIT: lines don't line up properly in other camera views on my PC when using simple "shader" and viewport render animation. I have to use actual render, which doesn't use this simple "shader". You can get a very simple toon "shader" in Material viewport (see pic). enter image description here enter image description here (P.S. I can't get multi-colour toon shading to work like you did for some reason).

For a simple multi-colour shader, use these nodes with your material: enter image description here

Here's a video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L791csCEJBg&t=608s

Another option is: BEER/MALT Renderer from blendernpr.org. STILL IN DEVELOPMENT. SO USE AT YOUR OWN RISK:

https://bnpr.gitbook.io/beer-malt-wiki/

https://github.com/bnpr/Malt

A Mix Of Geek Content
  • 61
  • 1
  • 4
5

Here's a rough attempt in eevee.

enter image description here

A Shader to RGB and a color ramp in constant mode, with a limited range of colors, then used for color in an other diffuse shader, will take care of the toon look.

Fresnel used as fac to mix a black diffuse shader will create the outline (I added a color ramp to distort the Fresnel info a bit).

susu
  • 14,002
  • 3
  • 25
  • 48
  • Sadly this is fresnel-based outlines and not quite as good as mesh outlines, but it's not bad! I think this is the closest you can get in Blender's (very limited) featureset - since actually doing a second render pass with displaced vertices is apparently not possible. –  Aug 27 '20 at 17:31
  • Yeah this seems to be the closest. I tried a lot of weird things like camera data input. To make the outlines have the same thickness everywhere. But it doesn't seem possible. Thanks for the answer – np20 Aug 27 '20 at 17:48