Blenderole

Ok, so the toon material on Blender is far from featured. It supports just two colors and a specular, where elsewhere you can get a wide variety of control over the shades. It can have edges for the shades, but you don’t have much control about their shape or size. But you can get something like this:

Hafunui, at blenderartists.org, posted an internesting workaround of the shading limitations using the ramp. I will use this to give a quick tour on the material editor:

. Preview: the usual preview. Trust this as much as you trust the preview from any other 3d software. (which is, not much).

. Links and Pipeline: technical stuff (will update this later), but you can see the object linked to a “nose” object.

. Ramps: the ramp shader. the trick here, for the toon shader, is using the third colorband next to the one before, which has the same value as the first. the material tab has settings for a plain color only.

. Shaders: actual shaders. here’s where you could find the toon shader (used, with 0 on all channels, on the specular)

The way you work with shaders in Blender is to choose them on the shaders tab, tweak the settings and material colors, and that’s it. Besides that you have a node system underneath everything where you can make much more interesting materials. This topic might be covered again on this blog but much more in the future.