Cartoon Edges

Blender's new material shaders, as per version 2.28, include nice toon diffuse and specular shaders.

By using these shaders you can give your rendering a comic-book-like or manga-like appearance, affecting the shades of colours, as you may be able to appreciate in Figure 32.

The effect is not perfect since real comics and manga also usually have china ink outlines. Blender can add this feature as a post-processing operation.

To access this option select the Edge button next to the OSA button (Figure 33). This makes Blender search for edges in your rendering and add an 'outline' to them.

Before repeating the rendering it is necessary to set some parameters. The Edge Settings opens a window to set these (Figure 34).

In this window it is possible to set the edge colour, which is black by default, and its intensity, Eint which is an integer ranging from 0 (faintest) to 255 (strongest). The other buttons are useful if the Unified render is used (see next section).

Figure 35 shows the same image as Figure 32 but with toon edges enabled, of black colour and maximum intensity (Eint=255).