The Process
I used three images to achieve the effect: a "paint" plate, an "ink" plate, and a clean alpha description of the ink line. Here's how the compositing looks in the "Compositing" section of the Effects Panel in Layout:
Screen Capture of the Effects Panel
Note: no Anti-Aliasing is used when rendering out the final "composite" image, since all Anti-Aliasing was done in the "paint" and "ink alpha" passes.
The Paint Pass
The "paint" plate is a render of your character without any Cel-Look Edges. Set Anti-Aliasing to the desired level (this image used Enhanced Low Anti-Aliasing). The "paint" plate will later be used as a Background Image for the compositing pass.
The Ink Plate
The "ink" plate represents the color of your Cel-Look Edge. It doesn't have to be the size of your rendered images -- a 1x1 pixel image can do just fine for a one-color Cel-Look Edge. The real fun of using a render-sized ink plate is using images as your ink "color" -- imagine a rainbow-colored ink line!
The Ink (Alpha Description) Pass
...and here's the image that makes the whole thing work: a smooth, clean alpha description of the ink line. Here's how I produced this image:
|
1) Cleared out all Lights (and set the remaining Light and Ambient Intensity to 0%).
2) Turned off all raytracing options in the Render Panel. 3) Removed every instance of Super Cel Shader from each cel-shaded surface (so that every surface would appear black when 0% lit). (I needed LightWave to focus solely on generating a good black-and-white description of the ink line. The first three steps are meant to optimize render times as much as possible -- necessary for this technique). 4) Set the Backdrop Color to RGB 0 0 0 5) Set the inked object's Cel-Look Edges to Large with a color of RGB 255 255 255
6) Set Anti-Aliasing to the same level as the setting used for the "paint" pass (in this case, Enhanced Low). 7) The Magic Button: Transparent Edges (from the "Advanced Options" section of the Surfaces Panel). To each surface that would be inked with Cel-Look Edges, I applied a slight Transparent Edge. The Edge Threshold used on all surfaces of this object was 0.2. (Note: different surfaces may require different Edge Threshold settings -- experiment to see which works best for your object!) |
Why This Works (I Think)