NPR Line creation test!!! Challenge

[paulhart]

I am starting a new thread to initiate a challenge. In my other thread, I was bemoaning the absence of demo/videos of good variable line using NPR in Lightwave. Feeling overly dense, I went into the DEMO Scenes that come with 2018 and looked at their line work. All well and good, except they all just used a Turbulence effect on the Taper of the lines. This does generate a nice variable line, BUT . . . not one of them showed any effort to respond to light source, in the line rendering. The Cel Shading, responds just fine to the light source, but NADA, ZIP relationship of the lines to light source. Major disappointment!!! I checked out one of RH's videos to see if I could adapt the settings to the line, working with Light Info, Item Info, even tried a Null, nothing, Normalized, piped through the Dot Product, nothing seems to work. I can make this work in Blender just fine, but it is a Post Process currently and I love the way the Lightwave does it on screen, in Real Time, which is great for artistic tweaking. No Japanese animation would be considered without a light responsive line!!
So, .. .. here is the challenge. I am attaching a simple scene, just a sphere, graded cel shaded, on a plane, with a portal light. I am including the Object file, with the Scene file but this can be easily created on the fly by anybody, so you don't have to download the file, but my Node setup is as shown in this image.
I will be happy to have someone demonstrate the limits of my knowledge. Newtek employees and Beta testers are welcome, as is anyone else.
Let the challenge begin!!

[hypersuperduper]

Use an incidence node. Light dir > incidence > taper that should work

[Ztreem]

This is one way of doing it.

[Skonk]

What is it you're trying to recreate by having the edges respond to light?

Cel shading and line edges are generally designed to represent the effect of hand painted cels, so the inked edges would have no response to light in the real world anyway; the thickness being based on pressure more than anything else.

So not sure why you would have expected the demo scenes to have edges that are modified by light direction.

[hypersuperduper]

What is it you're trying to recreate by having the edges respond to light?

Cel shading and line edges are generally designed to represent the effect of hand painted cels, so the inked edges would have no response to light in the real world anyway; the thickness being based on pressure more than anything else.

So not sure why you would have expected the demo scenes to have edges that are modified by light direction.

A typical cartooning technique is to have the outlines of a shape that are away from the light a little thicker than those toward the light. It is a subtle way to give a simple line drawing a little bit of substance and weight.

[paulhart]

hypersuperduper, Thank you for responding, as I was beginning to think all those years of inking drawings in art class were a hallucination. ZTreem, thank you, I will try it out and share my results. I knew that with the right nodes, it should be possible but I had not gotten this result.

[paulhart]

I am a fan of hand-drawn ink work. One of my favorites in the realm of graphic novels, is Jason Brubaker. I get a little 'sideways' at some of the ways he write his themes, but that's not the point. He does all of his drawings, hand inked, with a Pentel brush tip pen. HIs first book is "remind" and now he has been working on "Sithrah," both of which have beautiful layouts, line work and creative use of textures and color. Take a look, I am including a single page and a link to the 'remind' book, which you can read online, but having the hard copy is wonderful.
Link to 'remind' online. I would love to be able to moimic this style, in animation, in Lightwave.
http://www.remindblog.com/custom/remind-spread-4/
Link to 'Sithrah' also on line at Webtoons http://www.webtoons.com/en/fantasy/s...t?title_no=524

[paulhart]

Here is a successful render, using the Node setup that ZTreem demonstrated. Thank you, now on to further explorations, trying to get thicker lines in Occluded (tight angled areas), and other tricks. I also added some turbulence to rough up the line quality.

[paulhart]

Use an incidence node. Light dir > incidence > taper that should work

If you have an example that works, please share it here so we can all learn.

[Ztreem]

If you have an example that works, please share it here so we can all learn.

It's the same thing I did, but without the old layer nodes. It looks like this.

[Sekhar]

I am a fan of hand-drawn ink work. One of my favorites in the realm of graphic novels, is Jason Brubaker. I get a little 'sideways' at some of the ways he write his themes, but that's not the point. He does all of his drawings, hand inked, with a Pentel brush tip pen. HIs first book is "remind" and now he has been working on "Sithrah," both of which have beautiful layouts, line work and creative use of textures and color. Take a look, I am including a single page and a link to the 'remind' book, which you can read online, but having the hard copy is wonderful.
Link to 'remind' online. I would love to be able to moimic this style, in animation, in Lightwave.
http://www.remindblog.com/custom/remind-spread-4/
Link to 'Sithrah' also on line at Webtoons http://www.webtoons.com/en/fantasy/s...t?title_no=524

Why not just use the "Shrink Edges With Distance" option to get the depth effect on lines, as below

?

[VermilionCat]

Shrink Edges With Distance is very limited compared to Distance Gradient in the node editor which is no longer available in 2018. Sigh...

[JCG]

I love Ztreem's method because it's so easy to make small variations along the line by just adding more keys to the gradient. My problem was the aliasing. Even with the variance, it did not look inked because even with crazy amounts of samples ( I think I tried up to 500), it still had a bit of stepping. That immediately killed the illusion. Fortunately, in NPR, having a filter radius greater than 1 doesn't look bad. With a filter radius of 1.32 and just 7 samples, I really like the line LW makes.

and with a slightly less inky color, it looks a lot like a cartoon line.

I quite like these results; thanks for the thread!

[paulhart]

and JCG, thank you for your contributions. I will investigate your findings, and report back with my own efforts, time allowing....

[paulhart]

Okay, back to weird results, and have no clue. I copied the first sphere, moved it over, and mangled it a little to get some edges. I then turned on 'Sharp Creases' and I ended up with some kind of weird transparency effect. I was only expecting the edges facing to have any of this effect. I will investigate, but it's not what I expected.