Shader - Toon Shading

Toon shading! Sounds interesting isn't it?

Well, basically toon shading is another simple technique which you can be easily done in shader. (I mean a basic toon shading. If you want to do advanced toon shading, of cause it is difficult)

Since mostly toon shading gives you an unrealistic lighting. Basically it just has about 3 or 4 bands of lighting. So what you need to do is clamping the lighting value based on the look-up table.

What is the look-up table? Well, it just store the pre-defined value which you are going to use for the lighting clamping. Which mean, if your look-up table has only 3 values. You final result of the whole model (lighting) will only have 3 values as well.

For example:

The lighting value for that particular pixel is 0.4f, by using look-up table:

if (light > 0.8f)

light = 1.3f;

else if (light > 0.5)

light = 0.9f;

else

light = 0.5f;

From the pseudocode above, you can see that, no matter what value you get from the calculation, it will convert to either one of the 3 pre-defined values.

Here are some screenshots:

*Original model

*After applying toon shading (You can see that there are only 3 intensity level of light on the model)

*Toon shading with outline

If you wish to know more about toon shading, you can wiki it.

Download program demo here

Key control:

1: Default model

2: Toon shading

3: Toon shading with black outline

4: Change the background color to white/black