cartoon textures

[Creed]

To create a toon-like texture, you must reduce the number of shades of color in your texture.
Perhaps you could use Photoshop or some other paint program to increase the contrast of
your texture. That might give you a toon-like effect.

[Creed]

I just came up with another idea. Rather than bleeding out colors by increasing the constrast,
how about filtering them out by simply reducing the color count?

Paint Shop Pro has a tool called Decrease Color Depth. You can take an image and reduce
the color count down to 8, for example, using 3 types of reduction algorithms, like
nearest color, error diffusion, and ordered dither. I think that would give you much
better results.

[capone_adam]

IMO creed has just barely scratched the surface. Cartoon textures are a complex thing, much more difficult then photorealism I think. I too wish it was covered more.

A freind of mine at uni recently did his final year project which was based on cartoony texturing. He really looked into it and found out just how complex it is. One interesting thing to consider is that theres apparantly about 6 particular styles of cartoon texturing. He wrote loads on it and is now trying to expand on his information and publish a book on it. It would be the first of its kind.

if you want, check out this thread which went through his project. Its really interesting to see how he progresses and although not a tutorial it does produce some interesting information.

http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?t=188214

[Creed]

I was assuming Totoro was asking how to convert a photo-realistic texture into a toon texture,
rather than creating a toon texture from scratch.

Some of the toon textures from 3DTotal.com do look like they were originally photo-realistic
textures at some point. I can only imagine they were converted some way programmically, rather
than an artist painting the toon shades by hand.

And I'm not implying that simply reducing the color count of a photo-realistic texture will give
you a perfect toon texure. That's all it does, reduce the color count. There are certainly
more things to consider, like the nice contour shapes in toon textures. You could probably
just use it as a starting point to where to make your toon strokes.

[Totoro]

Interesting thread

I'm working on my graduation project and need to create some good cartoon textures and it's quite hard to find info about it. It's always photorealistic stuff.
Did your friend found any tutorials or other info on cartoon textures? Or did he just experiment by himself?

[rezatron]

I have a similiar question you may want to look at this thread. http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?t=260646

[Creed]

Well, it looks like everyone is looking for toon texturing that uses some type of 3D
rendering process.

Too bad you can't just take a photo-realistic texture and convert it to a toon texture
without any 3D knowledge at all. You know, no lights, no cameras, no 3D environment,
using just the information in the texture itself.

[Creed]

I just want to point out that I believe 3dtotal.com offers pre-rendered toon textures.
You know, you slap them on your model, and it supposedly should look toonish.

If you're looking to render a 3D scene with toon shaders or whatever, with lights and
cameras, then I think we are discussing something entirely different.

Totoro, do you have a specific reason why you want to use pre-rendered toon textures?
You did mentioned the site 3dtotal.com in your post.

[Totoro]

I'm sorry if I haven't made myself clear. What I meant by making cartoon textures was, how to make cartoon textures from scratch. So not editing photo's to look cartoony but just paint them yourself. Most of the cartoon textures from 3DTotal are handpainted from scratch. That's why I asked if anybody knew how to do that.

Basically I'm looking for good tutorials/tips on how to make textures but as you know nothing works without proper lighting in 3d. So if anybody has good tips on lighting a "cartoon" scene I'd like to know that too. Is it different from lighting a realistic scene?

Creed: I'm working on my graduation project and I wanted my short to have a look like the example renders in 3DTotal cartoon textures. So I figured that if I want that kind of look I'll have to start making my textures abit cartoony instead of a realistic approach. Because I don't think you'll get that kinda look only with the right light setup.

[Creed]

So you're doing an animation short? I think you should really find a toon shader to take
care of everything (including toon shadows), because doing it by hand would be extremely difficult.
It would depend on what 3D graphics application you're using of course.

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