Cartoon shader

In this tutorial, we’ll explain how to create a quite fast cartoon shader material without using any plugins. This shader is usually couple of times quicker (shorter rendering times) than 3ds max’s Ink&Paint material, but Ink&Paint does produces better quality effect.

Open the material editor and select an empty material slot. Change it’s type from Standard to Blend.

Enter the material in the “Material 1” slot. Change its Diffuse color to some shade of blue (we used R: 96 G: 170 B: 255).

Put a Falloff map in the Self-Illumination slot.

Change its “Falloff Type” to Shadow/Light and change the Mix Curve so it looks like on the next picture:

Now go back to the top Blend material and enter the material in its “Material 2” slot. Set the Diffuse color of the second material to black (R: 0 G: 0 B: 0).

Go back up again to the Blend material and put a Falloff map in the Mask map slot.

Set the options of the Falloff map to correspond to the next picture:

Final step is to change the Environment (keyboard shortcut: 8) Background color to white.

Apply the material to an object of your choice, set the lighting in the scene and hit the render button.

Note: If you fiddle around with the both Falloff map Mix curves, you can change the size and opacity of the cartoon shadows and the thickness of the outline.