Author Topic: Toon + Outline Mtl Playground!  (Read 2229 times)

2025-05-22, 15:02:54

maru

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The newest daily build of Corona comes with two new non-physical materials:
- Corona Toon Material - for giving objects a "posterized" look
- Corona Outline Material - for adding outlines around objects

Usage:
You can use the Toon Material on its own, or use it as the base material of an Outline Material.
You can also use these materials as global material override in your scenes, in which case you may also want to preserve some materials such as glass or materials using opacity.
You can apply textures to various properties of both materials.
Denoising works great with the Toon Material giving it a smooth cartoonish look.

Feel free to post your experiments and provide feedback about the new materials.






« Last Edit: 2025-05-22, 15:12:26 by maru »
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2025-05-22, 22:44:12
Reply #1

romullus

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After playing a bit with new toon and outline materials, i can say the team did really nice job. I like that outline is separate material and that it has its own global override. The toon controls seems a bit daunting at first, but are not hard to understand after some experimentation. I'm not sure if i like how posterization seems to take effect only on direct lit surfaces, while shadowed areas are shaded smoothly. Maybe that's a matter of settings tuning which i didn't figured yet.

I noticed that displacement only takes positive values, perhaps a bug? And bump mapping is missing. Hopefully it will be added soon.

Even if i'm not in to NPR rendering, i'm still very happy with Corona toon. It's nice to see Corona stepping a little bit outside typical arhcviz.
I'm not Corona Team member. Everything i say, is my personal opinion only.
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2025-05-23, 01:22:01
Reply #2

Tom

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This is great news, shout out to the team for these long awaited features!

2025-05-23, 10:52:35
Reply #3

Jpjapers

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This is fantastic!

Ive been requesting this since 2014 and its finally here! Well done team!

On the light blue shapes example above, theres a missing bit of outline on the end of the triangular sections. In my mind i cant figured out a reason why this wouldnt have an outline when the section of the same edge below does. Is that something that can be controlled in the shader?

2025-05-26, 21:14:58
Reply #4

TomG

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On the slicer image, yes the missing bit can be fixed by tweaking values - it was a Thresholds Normal of 0.73 for some reason, I must have been tweaking it for testing - but at the default of 0.85, there is no missing bit :)

BTW this was a test with the Slicer material, as I had heard Toon in V-Ray has trouble with the Clipper (their equivalent to Slicer). It all works fine in Corona from my testing so far, though - the one trick is if you have overlapping Slicer objects that have some coplanar faces that will be doing some slicing, you should ProBoolean them together into one Slicer object to avoid extra lines in capped surfaces. Screengrab of the scene set up attached so you can see where I probooleaned.
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2025-05-26, 21:26:32
Reply #5

TomG

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If you don't want to set up individual Toon materials for each object, but don't want them all to have the same color when using the global Material Override, use the Corona Multimap in the Toon shader (which you can also do for Line Width in the global Outlines override).

PS - I did make the floor an Exclusion from the global Toon material, to give its own multimap per element rather than per instance, so that each piece of wood got a different color)
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2025-05-26, 22:14:18
Reply #6

romullus

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If you don't want to set up individual Toon materials for each object, but don't want them all to have the same color when using the global Material Override, use the Corona Multimap in the Toon shader (which you can also do for Line Width in the global Outlines override).

Alternatively one can use Corona Data instead of Multimap and and have objects coloured by their wireframe colours.
I'm not Corona Team member. Everything i say, is my personal opinion only.
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2025-05-29, 07:42:33
Reply #7

triget

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I think the ability to export the outline as a separate mask would be great. Will there be such a solution?

2025-05-29, 08:08:54
Reply #8

LukaK

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Is there a possibility to render hidden edges and have different linestyles (like dashed for example)? What about edge extensions, wiggly lines?
Maybe its done on purpose in the sample renderings... but edge lines seem a bit blurry and not sharp at all.

2025-05-29, 09:37:03
Reply #9

OakCorp

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I would like it to have the same functionality as "Mask Color" in the Arnold Edge Shader.
Edges are detected when adjacent pixels have different mask colors.
https://help.autodesk.com/view/ARNOL/ENU/?guid=arnold_user_guide_ac_toon_ac_toon_edge_html

want to draw a line like the attached

« Last Edit: 2025-05-29, 09:51:08 by OakCorp »
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2025-06-02, 10:10:29
Reply #10

NazarVitkovskyi

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@OakCorp please raise a request for this on on our Idea Porta: https://chaoscorona.ideas.aha.io/ideas
Here is a guide how to do that: https://support.chaos.com/hc/en-us/articles/27701668531729-How-to-request-a-new-feature
« Last Edit: 2025-06-02, 17:27:35 by NazarVitkovskyi »

2025-06-02, 10:56:20
Reply #11

NazarVitkovskyi

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@LukaK  please raise a request for this on on our Idea Porta: https://chaoscorona.ideas.aha.io/ideas
Here is a guide how to do that: https://support.chaos.com/hc/en-us/articles/27701668531729-How-to-request-a-new-feature
« Last Edit: 2025-06-02, 17:27:59 by NazarVitkovskyi »


Today at 13:37:56
Reply #13

JoachimArt

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I struggling to understand how you can set up a simple toon shader of two colors completely opaque, without shading. It seems now, even if you choose no shading between the two colors, there's still shading and also ambient occlusion and GI will still appear. I mean if you want a really stylized cartoon look, is that achievable? and it seems the colors only affect what is in the light, not in the non lit area? I can't seem to get it to work.
See example image of what I get, even when theres no interpolation - when Im trying to get the look of the sketches sphere below.
« Last Edit: Today at 13:47:07 by JoachimArt »