Theoretical text supplementary image: Testing of different render engine

April 27, 2021

Theoretical text supplementary image: Testing of different render engine

Although I have decided to use toon shade in the project. I still tried to render some PBR shader for fun at first. (I used a penguin model as a test model for different shaders)

Arnold:

Renderman:

Then I tried the toon shader of Arnold. It is buggy and not suitable for production. I used the traditional PBR algorithm to calculate the toon shader. Which means it gave an extremely slow rendering time when compared to other toon shaders engine. Also, it did not support opacity map. It is a huge problem for me as there will be some lace decoration on my model which relies on opacity map. Furthermore, colors and strokes of the model needed to render in separate setting. Them cannot be rendered at the same time. It is non efficient for production. So, I gave up on using such an undeveloped toon shader engine and found another better engine for my production.

First try on Arnold toon shader:

Optimized result:

Arnold toon shader with full reflectiveness (made for fun):

First time I tested toon shader with my character:

For the real production, I used “Pencil+ 4 for 3ds Max” as my render engine. It is a well-developed render engine which has been used by the 3d anime industry for a long time. Anime like BEASTARS, Land of the Lustrous, RWBY, Poupelle of Chimney Town, Love Live!, Gundam series, and EVANGELION series has all used it as their toon shading render engine. The 3ds max version is a bit more advanced, so I chose it rather than the Maya version. I read through the whole book of user Manual, explored all referencing file given by the manufacturer and did a lot of test on the software.

A fake rim light made by manually tweaked reflection. (no light is placed at the back of character.):