| TG Toon Sketch Intro |
| The stock trueSpace character Vincent becomes a newspaper boy, as he and his surroundings are rendered using the TG Toon Sketch shaders. |
| What It Does These reflectance shaders build on TG Toon Reflectance, and add more capabilities. The primary new feature is that the lighting steps now affect calls to a texure map. As the lighting intensity gets less (darker), the texture map is layered on top of itself, with varying frequency - the lower the lighting intensity, the more times the texture is layered, resulting in denser lines, or dots, or any other texture you use. The textures are treated as alpha maps, reducing the brightness - the value in the red channel is used for this, with maximum red not reducing the intensity (so not affecting the final output), and zero red making the final result a solid black - values in between reduce the intensity, and the effect is cumulative with the different layers. It sounds more complicated than it is! Sample texture maps are provided to get you started - the best thing to do is try it, and you’ll soon see how the shader works. Alongside that, the shader offers the same colour quantisation as seen in TG Toon Reflectance, but this time it offers a range of different colour processes - because the “intensity” is now handled by the heaviness of the shading / sketching effect, for instance, you may choose to remove intensity from the final colour displayed, leaving the heaviness of the shading alone to darken the render. There are a range of shaders provided, eg for the range of no specular highlights, to specular highlights, to hard specular highlights, along with whether the sketching texture is projected from the screen / image or not. QUICK FAQ : Q : Why not just use parameters for the different versions, eg for including specular highlights? A : The shaders have a lot of processing in them, and cover the range of options I felt were necessary to achieve the range of effects that someone might be after. In order to reduce that load, some options were split into separate shaders. Also, the sheer number of options meant that the shaders were reaching the limits of the number of possible parameters in ShaderLab. Q : Why are the sketching effects done by texture map, and not procedurally? A : Several reasons influenced this decision. First, as noted, the sheer range of parameters was making the shaders complex, and reaching the number of parameters available in ShaderLab - to generate effective sketching style effects procedurally would have added greatly to those parameters! Also, as noted, the shaders are also quite calculation intensive already, and to get something more effective than just the standard Turbulence functions would have made them painfully slow. Finally, to be honest, there is no way that a single procedural approach could have captured more than a narrow band of styles and effects. By choosing to use texture maps, overlaid in this way, it keeps the options virtually unlimited! Any required pattern or look can be simulated, from dots similar to newsprint, to lines similar to pencil or charcoal, to paintbrush style strokes, or even random noise... or anything else you are creative enough to think of when coming up with your own texture maps! Of course, a range of textures are provided along with the shaders, so that you can get started using them straight away. |
| TG Toon Sketch Intro |
| TG Toon Sketch Parameters |
| TG Toon Pack Index |