New Shader Material Preview

Hello Patrons

I've been working on a specific material for quite a while which I like to use for more artistic styled images such as comic or toon shading to render certain types of character models. 

Starting with this idea I had since 2020 I tried different variations and techniques of shading styles to figure it out which would be the most "suitable" one for both performance and eye fidelity reasons.

Getting to work with the character model - You know my works with the game guys and as much as I enjoy to work on human models, I also like to expand my workflow into a little other areas aside into more comic or even cartoony styled objects.  Since I also like to play games from a certain company which their name starts with "N" (I'm not writing the full name here for various reasons but I assume you know exactly of which japanese company I am talking about) which gave me a little more interest in their art style and overall characters. Last year I made my first render with a "non human character" which I liked to test my skills when it comes to different shading. To get a closer look of the character I'm talking about click here 

It turned out quite nicely Imo for the first try but there's still room for improvement. This time I messed around with Incineroar - since his body is covered pretty much with fur it was a nice challenge for me to pull something off like this:

And yea... that's the result...💩  Well crap this was a total failure so I scrapped that idea and went back to the drawing board. xD

Using "fur" shading in the first place isn't something I went for after this very "unhappy" result above and tbh, it doesn't even suit the characters art style that much even if it was "applied" in the right way.

Going back to one of my earlier attempts to create toon shading which I did for our EVEREC Group Art special back in October 2021 (click here to see it) I used this material type as a base for my new shader project and started working on it. After few trials and errors I managed to get a pretty much acceptable result which you can see down below:

I liked this approach much more but there's still something I wanted to improve and make it more unique. Also this shader material up here was "split" into two parts which required to render the same image twice and combine them as one final image later in Photoshop which was an additional step of work.

To overcome this issue I managed to combine the two shader materials into one single unit which allows me to render the image with the same effects in one single pass meaning it saves more time. At this point all of my "preparations" were done until I saw a tech video of the new Pokemon Legends Acreus and it's rather "bizarre" graphics style which makes some of the surfaces in the game have a very strong and shimmery appearance, looking very unpleasant to me and it kinda reminded me to my newly created material I just did for Incineroar.

Before I went to "overhaul" my shader material it looked like this:

Yes I made a different pose for the model this time and re-worked some of the rather low res game textures to give them a cleaner look but as I mentioned above the shader just had a bit too much of this weird shimmering effect which I wanted to get rid of. After spending a bit more time into fine tuning the material and lighting, I went to build a little scene around it and decided to create a full render for you guys.

With all that said here's a final preview of the actual state of the shader, all those images you seen so far are unedited in engine render previews which can be altered based on your likenesses and feedback.

Here we go! That's the final state of my new shader so far - for this version I gave the model some needed edits which I believe looks pretty good on him. I reduced the amount of outlines a little bit and increased the roughness and sheen which makes his surface look less shimmery and more defined. Too bad that I had set a black background color in this shot which makes the amount of black outlines on the character model look even less but they are still present. - Don't worry for the full render I will use a nicely background which shows the model in all it's glory. ^^

Alright guys now it's up to you, tell me your honest opinion (even when it doesn't sound pretty) it helps me to improve and that's is exactly what I am looking for.

Thank you very much for reading and have a nice day

~F0