Sketch&Toon - Line Rendering Tutorial

S&T Line Render Tutorial

Hey everyone,

as i promised on Twitter here is the Tutorial on how to create glowing lines using CINEMA 4D’s “Sketch&Toon”. The cool thing about S&T is that it enables you to render your lines in an “Additive” mode. This is so cool to create to glowing lines as shown above and it’s fairly simple. This technique works best when using “Splines”, for example the Tracer of MoGraph can create really nice splines. Just follow my tips below and your time to glow is near :)

1.) Sketch & Toon Material

Well first of create a Sketch & Toon material by going to your Material Editors menu called Create. There you’ll find an entry called Shader. Choose from it’s menu Sketch Material.

2.) Open the ME (Material Editor) via double click

You should now see something like the following image. Make sure you switch the “Control Level” to “Advanced”.

Main Settings

3.) Switch to the “Strokes” tab and enable Strokes. That’s it. Ignore the rest.

Strokes

4.) Switch to the Distort tab and activate. Feel free to adjust the distortion until you’re happy. I used for my example Displace = 6 and Noise Scale = 1200%

Distort

5.) Next we’ll change the Color. Because we will set the line rendering to “Add” later on i recommend choosing colors which are a bit darker, they add up, remember ? The cool thing here is, that you’re able to define how S&T will render the color. In my example it’s “Along Stroke”. I think it’s pretty sweet because you can create cool FX.

color

6.) Opacity is your friend. At least when you render something in “Additive” mode :) Here are my settings. Again i used “Along Stroke”. It really helps to sell it, if your lines disappear somehow :)

Opacity

7.) Las but not least “Render” Tab. The most important part of this tutorial. Here we’ll make the lines add up on rendering. Make sure to enable “Self-Blend” - Add and  "Blend" - Add. Theoretically you’re set now :) Easy isn’t it. But the output is nearly infinite. 

Render

One last thing. The “The Rendersettings”.  Just turn of Shading for Background and  Object. At least for this sort of style :) Oh and make sure to disable everything except Splines in the Lines Tab of the S&T Render Settings.

Render Settings

See a demo movie (old) of this technique here

Have fun playing with it and if you liked it tell your friends to sop by.

neosushi

Looking for the “99frames” - The Social Animation Project informations ? Just click here and i’ll take you there.

  1. neosushi68 posted this