Toon/Cel Shading (Pokémon X/Y Style?)

[Sketchasaurus]

Hey everyone, I've been fiddling around in 3Ds max, trying to achieve a result similar to the Rendering style in Pokémon X/Y for parody purposes with minor (and varying degrees of) success.


The model itself isn't finished texture/rigging-wise (and there are a few elements I want to tweak to the polygons)

But my main problem that I've been encountering is limiting the shading to simple areas and shapes on the model.


There's a lot of banding going on, but I also want to limit the lit area to the region of his head where it looks more like this:


I may have to modify the geometry of my model, but I also would like to find a way to better control what the shader does at render. I've been searching the internet to see if anyone has posted any attempts at this style, but to no avail.

I'm not working on any particular time table on this, but any input would be greatly appreciated.

[huskyfish14]

Here's my method for this kind of toon shading:

[alexmach1]

can you take a screenshot of your material settings?

[huskyfish14]

can you take a screenshot of your material settings?

The first screenshot of blender IS my material settings! all i did is make a brand new material, and set it to shadeless
if u still need more help, just say so and i'll post screenshots of the material and texture settings

[alexmach1]

The first screenshot of blender IS my material settings! all i did is make a brand new material, and set it to shadeless
if u still need more help, just say so and i'll post screenshots of the material and texture settings

should have clarified that I was asking sketchasaurus.

is this the desired effect that you want? I used the brawl charizard model as a base.

[huskyfish14]

here is an easier-to-see example of my method, since the pics above were very small, and hard to see. I also used the brawl Charizard so we can compare the two!

[Sketchasaurus]

Here are my render settings at the moment. Though I have anti-aliasing disabled and I'm exporting out at the 3Ds Resolution (top screen: 400x240) to achieve the pixelated aspect of the effect.

The Ink 'n Paint preset is what I used as a basis for the rendering style, but the shadow placement is somewhat unsatisfactory to what I want to achieve. I will say that Huskyfish's render is a close approximation of what kind of shadow distribution I'm looking for.

I think it would be very informative if we were able to get a hold of the model textures from X/Y in order to see if some of the shading is influenced by the texture maps in any way.

What I'm thinking is part of the effect is dictated by the lighting setup in the scenes as well, and there's most likely a specially coded shader that dictates how exactly the shadows are projected onto the models. But thanks for the input so far, it'd be sweet if we figure this out.

[alexmach1]

if you need more control over how the lighting works, you can use a standard material with a falloff map in the diffuse with these settings:

and in the falloff map:

to get this:


each point on the line affects how the map is distributed along the surface, so you can adjust them to your liking. for example, if you want the shadows to be smoother, you can move the points further away, like this:

to end up with this:


and for the black outline, you can use the hacky face-extrude-invert commonly used for cel-shaded things:


here's the file I used, without the textures.
dropbox

[huskyfish14]

I think you should use Alexmach's method. While my method provides better control for how you want the shadows to appear, alexmach's method still allows the shadows to be controlled with lights, my method is completely unaffected by lamps unfortunately. Though it may not be unfortunate if you are going for a more cartoony style, where shading doesnt give the model it's detail, rather the textures do