Thanks for your appreciation.
As for lighting, I'm actually using lamps. Cycles toon shader is very special (NPR shader in a physically based renderer, after all) and works best with hard lamps (lamps with size parameter set to somewhere between 0 and 0.1). If you want smooth gradients, then you tweak "size" and "smooth" parameters in the shader itself. If you want to learn the details, I wrote a full tutorial for this shading technique here some time ago. Lighting and shading in this render are an slightly evolved version.
As for animation, I must confess I still haven't tested this shading technique for animation, and it would probably need some further tweaking for it to work effectively, but I'm optimistic. For the time being, I'm using this shading technique for preview purposes, since it gives interesting looking previews in mere seconds and is rather easy to set up once you get the hang of it.
And the antropomorphic aspect of my robots... Oh, well... You know how self centered we humans are and how we like everything to reflect our "greatness"... It's only logical that we like our machines to look a bit like us... Or at least how we would like to be perceived...
As for lighting, I'm actually using lamps. Cycles toon shader is very special (NPR shader in a physically based renderer, after all) and works best with hard lamps (lamps with size parameter set to somewhere between 0 and 0.1). If you want smooth gradients, then you tweak "size" and "smooth" parameters in the shader itself. If you want to learn the details, I wrote a full tutorial for this shading technique here some time ago. Lighting and shading in this render are an slightly evolved version.
As for animation, I must confess I still haven't tested this shading technique for animation, and it would probably need some further tweaking for it to work effectively, but I'm optimistic. For the time being, I'm using this shading technique for preview purposes, since it gives interesting looking previews in mere seconds and is rather easy to set up once you get the hang of it.
And the antropomorphic aspect of my robots... Oh, well... You know how self centered we humans are and how we like everything to reflect our "greatness"... It's only logical that we like our machines to look a bit like us... Or at least how we would like to be perceived...
MANY THANKS for the reference/tutorial on "toon" shading!!! I've been looking for something about that, but as always, if you don't know what something is CALLED, it's very hard to find anything about it.
And now for something comepletely different...
Was it you that I once had a discussion with about wood grains? I just now came across info about that. A guy wrote a bleeping Master's thesis about that, and I've put some information about it on my Journal. Hope that enables you to find a copy of his thesis, if you're interested. As I thought, it's acknowledged to be a very hard problem, so it's worthwhile digging up what others have done on it.
And now for something comepletely different...
Was it you that I once had a discussion with about wood grains? I just now came across info about that. A guy wrote a bleeping Master's thesis about that, and I've put some information about it on my Journal. Hope that enables you to find a copy of his thesis, if you're interested. As I thought, it's acknowledged to be a very hard problem, so it's worthwhile digging up what others have done on it.
Ah, yes. We did have a talk about wood grain when I released the first version of my procedural varnished wood shader. I haven't touched the topic for a while now, but I will try to have a look at your journal when I get some spare time. Thanks for the heads up.