Toon + Outline Mtl Playground!

[JoachimArt]

Thanks! I must admit, this implementation disappoint me quite a bit. I do understand that corona is a renderer, and therefore GI and stuff comes naturally within the render - and that is aboslutely fine. But for me a toon render is not to render something with a slightly different shaded look,  but a way to buypass and have control over the shading of a model, so you can achieve stylized looks of your liking. For me CoronaToonMTL seems only to give you some very limited control, but yet very similar to regular materials except it just looks worse, in my opinion. When you give the option to have linear or none shaded between two positions in the shaded range of the model but it doesn't do any of what the UI indicates and it only affect certain parts of the model then what exactly is the point of even having this option at all? It seems like you implemented the menu of Vray toon but didnt manage to add the behaviour and therefore it just seem unfinished or broken. The whole ToonShader then becomes just an experimental playground with very limited control and basically useless, in my opinion.

Even the example on the top of this thread, the blue rendered architecture you can just as well achieve using the regular PBR material, there's nothing toony or cell shaded about it, except the outline.
But, If you look at the v-ray toon shader which initially seems to have very similar options and controls, but you can achieve complete cell shading and very stylized looks and you have full control because there's a profound difference between the various shading options you choose on the gradient, and therefore it makes it possible to utilize it for a ton of different things.  Also the Arnold Toon render works properly in this regard.

I truly hope and beg that you are not going to settle with the current state of this shader/feature, because I don't think it will be used much at all by anyone.
The reason why I’m a corona user and fan has always been been great and smart implementation of features, so you can create good results with less fiddling and a smart thought through UI with good default settings. This seem to be the exact opposite, bad implementation so you struggle to get the result you need (if even possible) and a lot more fiddling to get there. It's not really a toon shader at its current form in my opinion.   

Sorry for the long rant - just very disappointed.

[JoachimArt]

I don't know where to adress this properly, or open a discussion about it...I know I said this in a rant in the toon playground thread, but I really feel that the ToonSHader should be properly discussed now that it has been released - before it takes any foothold -  and I wish my arguments would be heard. Because the way it has been implemeneted feels half-way there to put it mildly. And, since a lot of the jobs I do are in this style I hope the team will consider the feedback and pointers from users (like me) before ending on such a solution as it is right now. At the current state I think it is not usable for anything I do in this style, and I will have to go back to using arnold or even consider using V-ray instead.

I really don't mind putting time into writing and illustrating what is not working or should be improved, with pictures etc....But no point if this is what we get and nothing more will be done about it.

[TomG]

We always welcome suggestions for improvements to features - just be sure to send those in (or vote for them if they are there already) through the Ideas Portal at https://chaoscorona.ideas.aha.io/ , as here on the forum they may get lost.

Also, do make each request a separate entry, because if lots of things are combined into one there's no way for people to vote accurately, and no way for us to accurately say "This is being worked on, that will take more time, this won't be done" etc. for each specific request or idea. Thanks!

[JoachimArt]

Ok its not a feature request per se. I just think the toon shader is wrongly implemented as of currently. So is that then a feature request? What I mean is…You have a gradient that is suppose to work on the entire shade or specular of the model, currently it only affect half of it which is in light area. Second, you can select between gradient, "linear" or "none" between the colors throughout the shade of the model. But if you select no gradient it still grades the model as if it has regular shading, so basically you cannot achieve cell shading at all and the "none" is basically non functional. To me this seems like a bug. Thirdly, if you want to make the toon shader great is should have the ability to use the osl halftone or something similar so that you can get halftone dither or line transitions that are stylized. All of this you can achieve in v-ray or in  Arnold, none of this is possible in the corona toon shader.
To me this feels more like a bug, not a feature request, because at least the cell shading is what defines «toon» shading in my eyes.

But if you disagree and you only will consider it as a feature for future consideration then I don’t think I’m able to make you understand. I guess I’ll stick to using other renders for toon then… :(

[romullus]

I've moved recent messages from the dailies to the toon topic. @JoachimArt, lets keep discussions on this topic in one place.

[TomG]

Ah, this just got moved. Copy pasting my post which was a reply to this one :)

Well, a bug would be if the feature was intended to achieve those effects such as half tone dithering and they are not working, but it is not built to achieve that effect which makes it a feature request. On the gradient, depends on what you mean - shadowing and GI are not affected, the Toon shader is changing the Diffuse (direct) and Specular Highlights. This means smooth gradients may still be seen in shadows etc. Since the shader wasn't intended to posterize shadows, this too would be a feature request. But in this instance it could be you mean something else about not achieving cel shading, in which case it might be a bug and then a ticket via https://support.chaos.com/requests/new would be the way to go.

Much can be done with the current shader though, two examples I've just been messing around with. The core is using CShading_Components with only Direct Diffuse and Reflection enabled, and Indirect disabled entirely. Then there are other things done, such as making the Sun very small, and using a native Max light with no shadows, and a Corona rectangle light with Directionality of 1.

I can't share the scene, but I deleted everything, then played with the lights a little bit with just plane and sphere, placing a Corona Sun, Max Directional no shadows, Max Directional shadows, Max spherical no shadows, and rectangular Corona Light, sample image from that scene is the Corona Sun enabled everything else disabled. Sky was also set to pure black, with a direct visibility override to give it some color.

EDIT just changed the saved scene to avoid the annoying missing textures warning on opening :) PS don't forget to swap to the Components render element view, as there is still some subtle gradiation in the Beauty.

No idea if the light, scene, or material set ups here will let you get close to what you were hoping for, but they might!

[JoachimArt]

Thanks for answering and listening, yeah I do see now how Corona intended it to work, and with your examples you do have slightly more control than I could find. But still because the colors and ambient are affected by the exposure and the sun light instead of set colors in the gradient you still cant achive highly stylized looks with full control. Lets say you want the ambient to match first color of the gradient, it does that when the sun is at exposure of 0, but then the color of the light hitting the ball will not look the way you set it up. I can get the green color to be exactly what I set it to be, but then the sun is making the ambient darker than the set color. If there's any way to make the ambient color of the toon shader to become unlit, then I think one can work around it and have some control of what colors one might want. (see attachemtn called ambient and screenshot) I think the look you see on the car example would now be impossible.

I also feel that using the sun to control the hard shading, is kinda weird. I mean if you have a gradient with selected stepped colors, with no interpolation, why shouldn't that work with all lights as you would assume it would and directionality should only affect how much of the light is covering the object and not canceling out the hard stepped color steps.

About the halftone stuff, yes that's a feature request I suppose. I see that you can add textures now into the gradient, but it would have been awesome if it supported the OSL halftone, the way Arnold does. (see the attachmed halftone examples) or a custom shader.
 

[TomG]

Just a quick note, to see if we are on the same page - the directionality for the Corona Light was to give hard shadows from a very large light that was intending to be like an "ambient" light to fill the scene in general. You can get hard banding and hard shadows from a e.g. a sphere light simply by making it very small (and because intensity is measured in light emitted per surface area, increasing the intensity significantly). It's only if you want something large where you have to get into high directionalities for Corona lights.

Though it is just easier in general to use the non-physically realistic Max lights in that case since those actually have zero dimensions and are true point lights :) That's the thing about a Toon result, you don't really want physically realistic lighting in it anyway. You can see that even very small, there is still some slight softening in some edges from a Corona light - which could be beneficial, or not, depending.

Attaching a version of the scene with small Corona light in it, but still, easier and faster to render to use the Max lights, where you also have the option to have shadows or not.

[JoachimArt]

Thanks! Yeah we are on the same page...I will test using deault max lights, curious to see if you can control the specular sizes then....
About the ambient, are you able to define the color of that one, without it becoming dark. Lets say you want bright green or red ambient to the toon material, are you able to achieve that without making the etire scene bright, like the picture I posted called ambient.jpg ?

[JoachimArt]

Thanks Tom for helping. I tested now with default max light and that makes it easier to to get control, like you say they are point lights with no physical attributes. :)

But, the Diffuse and Ambient of the Toon material do affect the colors on the entire object now. so if you want a bright ambient (very stylized) its not achievable now without affecting the diffuse colors as well. Unless you have some magic trick for that ;) I guess that's a feature request then, to be able to have an option where the ambient and diffuse are not multiplied on top of eachother but rather completely opaque because then you would be able to set the exact colors for the lit and unlit part and make shadows of different colors than the lit areas. (see attachment with standard 3ds max light and blue shadow red is being affected by the ambient)

[TomG]

You are welcome, and in exchange thanks for such thorough testing with an aim toward real world usage! I can see the benefit of what you suggest regarding Ambient and Diffuse, and yes please if you could, do send that in via the Ideas Portal. I can't think of a current magic trick to get around it off the top of my head :(

[Aram Avetisyan]

Hi,

While there are definitely ways to control the toon and get results close to what you want, we have some ideas on how to improve the general control for toon. Stay tuned.

[JoachimArt]

Ooooh, I like what Im seeing!! :D
So I should wait then to throw in some feature requests I suppose?

Edit: Just mentioning wishes now that you teased me : when you are making some improvements, then I think it would be great if you can override any kind of colors made by shadows or shading so the user have full control of the coloring (if needed). And for the halftone pattern, if it at least could be like the v-ray where a black and white mask can mask between two colors of the gradient (from what I can gather is seems your screenshot has that or close to that, though the dots seem to be on the entire image :D ) . But, if possible, also to support the halftone OSL shader so the mask can adapt, so dots or lines can become thicker/thinner based on the transition, not just a single pattern as in v-ray.

[Aram Avetisyan]

Ooooh, I like what Im seeing!! :D
So I should wait then to throw in some feature requests I suppose?

Glad to hear that!
Yes please, we will try implementing some of the ideas first (like exclude GI, better ramp control for lit and unlit parts etc.) and then share (daily builds probably) with users to get feedback. This way we will make the toon better (great again?) one step at a time.

[JoachimArt]

Thank you thank you!!! I will definately keep an eye on the daily builds to participate in that!

Just to explain what I meant with halftones, incase what I wrote is confuzing, here's a mockup of one way to implement is which I think would have been awesome!