The idea is to compose the final image from 4 layers: the highlight layer, the mid-tones layer, the rim-light layer, and the shadow layer. It's possible to render an animation using this method, but honestly, it's better to learn a bit of shading in Blender and render using Eevee rather than make 5 or 6 renders of your animation.You can't really preview the result until you start composing.You can easily paint in shadows or highlights later during postprocessing.I'll be honest, the core concept here is the same as in this guide, but we're going to take it to the next level. I think this is more useful for rendering animations, it's kinda too limiting for a proper poster. There's really nothing else to say about this. Here it is btw: /file/d/1dx0ppEt2bG83D9Mx589bB84NyVqK0GPb/view?usp=sharing I've made a custom void map with only 1 environmental lighting, and it gives these shadows: That's the main problem of this method: you're very limited in terms of flexibility of your lighting. Open up Hammer and make a custom map with a lighting setup you want. Find a different place on your map with more preferable lightingī. Usually these aren't very appealing, so if you want to change that you need toĪ.

If the map has multiple lights it may create these stepped shades: This one is easy: all you need is a map with lighting and a sharp light warp texture, and you're good to go: Can't change lights color, direction, or any other property without postprocessing or recompiling the map.Works only with light_dynamic (map lighting).(SFM outlines vs inverted hull method outlines baked in the model) If you look carefully, you can see that the outline is essentially a thicker copy of the model with a pure-black color material.ĭunno which one of these SFM uses, but I'm guessing the first one since the outlines in SFM are all the same width regardless of the distance of a model from the camera (click on the images to zoom in to see the difference): Here's my port of Dust from Lethal League Blaze as an example: So you're rendering outlines alongside the model. It's done by extruding vertices of the mesh along their normal directions, inverting the direction of the resulting faces, and making them pure black (or the other color you need). The first one is pretty self-explanatory, so let me talk about the second one. and using so-called 'inverted hull method'. (Image credit: answer from KTC on gamedev.stackexchange ) There are 2 methods of doing outlines in 3D (at least these are the ones I'm aware of lol): adding outlines after rendering the image based on the normals information: AO-based outlines in SFM are pretty garbage, but it's not like we have any alternatives aside from drawing them manually in post This one should be easy: it helps differentiate the object from the background.

Comic text layer style photoshop