Maxon Sketch and Toon review

Tom Arah Read more October 7, 2009

£271

Price when reviewed

The main interest of 3D modelling lies in producing photo-realistic output, but there are other options. With the Sketch and Toon add-on module you can turn your scene into a technical drawing, a hand-drawn sketch, or a fully realised work of art.

It couldn’t be easier: add a new Sketch Material, preview your scene and the effect is automatically applied. Open the Sketch Material’s main tab and choose from dozens of presets such as air brush, chalk, marker and a whole range of pen and pencil effects. What really sets Sketch and Toon apart, though, is that many of these really do look hand-drawn by a draughtsman or artist.

Switch to Intermediate or Advanced Mode and preset effects can be explored or created. In the Strokes tab, you can control how line segments should be joined together into strokes. In the Distort and Adjust tabs, you can apply a curve to the stroke and set up offsets, overshoots, transforms and variations to give a more fluid, hand-drawn feel. Then, in the Colour, Thickness and Opacity tabs, you can set these all-important parameters and vary them according to a whole host of modifiers such as distance, position, length along stroke and angle.

As well as setting up the line style, you can specify where lines are applied – this is primarily done in Cinema 4D’s Render Settings dialog. By default, lines are applied to folds, creases and borders, but you can also apply them to outlines, materials, edges, and contours. You can set Cinema 4D’s Editor View to display where lines will be applied, and, crucially, you can also override settings on an object or polygonal selection level using dedicated tags.

The Render Settings dialog is also where you set overall shading. The default is a simple quantising effect, though you can also apply a custom colour, background, or a gradient-based simplification. Much greater control and power is provided by four dedicated shaders. The Cel shader lets you take full control of Manga-style shading, based on custom gradients, whereas the Spots shader simulates halftone spots, or any other shape, based on brightness. The Hatch shader lets you apply any texture as a cross-hatching effect, and the Art shader lets you use an image of a textured and lit sphere that’s then applied to an object, based on its surface normals and with no lighting necessary.

With Sketch and Toon, the level of power and control that Maxon offers isn’t just extraordinary, it’s truly unique.