Getting some weird results in C4D when I try to render with the Arnold toon shader. Are my normals messed up? Or is something wrong with my Arnold shader?

#1

I’m very new to C4D btw, so forgive me if these are newb questions.

So I have this model I made. Not that it matters, but I made it in zbrush years ago and imported the OBJ to c4d (v20).
Here’s a screenshot

The first thing that jumps out at me is that it seems like the two cylinders are very faceted. I don’t remember them looking or rendering like that in maya or marmoset toolbag. I tried aligning the normals, but that didn’t seem to smooth things out at all. Is there anything else I can try to get this to render smoothly?

This is only a secondary issue, but I suspect it might have something to do with the main issue. I’m using the Arnold toon shader. I’ve watched some tutorials but my renders seem to be very messy/noisy. Here’s a screenshot.

As you can see from that render, most of the flat surfaces have this sort of stippling halftone effect that I wouldn’t expect to see on a flat surface. It definately seems wrong on the floor at the top of the staircase. The beveled edges don’t get any lines, but the flat surface of the sides do. It’s some sort of edge detection issue, but I can’t figure out why it’s happening. Any thoughts?

Thanks!!

#2

My first guess is maybe you have co-exiting planes/polys where the stippling effect is. Maybe try running the Optimize command to fuse those olanes or take a closer look and see if you may need to remove the extra polys (if thats what it is)

Also–in case you havent looked at the documentation

https://docs.arnoldrenderer.com/display/A5AFCUG/Toon+Shading+a+Mech

#3

Holy crap! You are right. Somehow the mesh got duplicated in a number of areas and there are four or five instance of each part on top of each other.

Thanks so much! I don’t think I would have thought of this or discovered it.

#5

Saw your post about the import copying multiple versions. Im wondering if theres invisible history files that are being imported (maya can keep a history of all states of a model as you work) You may have already gotten it sorted.

#6

Yeah, I fixed it, but still don’t know why it was happening. I had deleted all history and exported as a obj but it still kept doubling up objects for some reason.

I had all the different components in separate groups so I ungrouped them and re-exported everything and it seemed to work properly after that (and the file size dropped by almost 1/2). So I don’t know what was going on, but it’s seems to be sorted now.

Thanks!