Inkwood shaders for Blender

September 13, 2020September 13, 2020 New Media Supply 0 Comments Shaders

The Inkwood shaders for Blender contains several shaders for ink drawings. These are suitable to make renders for comic strips right in Blender. Because I was not very familiar with ink-shading it took me a while to find out how to use it. Still I am not an expert for sure, but there are a few things I found out and share that in this article. Here a demonstration of the Durink shader which comes with Inkwood:

Comic strip with Durink Inkwood shaders for Blender — Comic strip with Durink

A few tips using the Inkwood shaders for Blender

So far, I played mainly with the Durink shaders. Although most shaders have similar settings, some might be specific to Durink. First thing to notice is that the shader interacts with the light (obviously) but also view. Initially this makes that the shaders are suitable for comic strips, rather than animation (But there is a workaround and come back to that later). One of the shaders is different, which is the Ink Outlines (more info follows later). First a few tips for the Durink Shader:

The shaders are for EEVEE.
Best is to use a three point light with small radius.
Set the Base Color first, because the Base Color affects other settings.
Now Bother first about the settings: Shadow, Shadow Contrast, Line Scale, Line Rotation.
Check the settings: Ratio Fix Lines, and Ratio Fix Lines Support.
Fine Tune with all the other settings.

When you have multiple objects in your scene, you can now copy the material, and make it unique. Most likely you need only to bother then about the settings: Shadow, Shadow Contrast, Line Scale, Line Rotation. Below the Durink Shader:

The Ink Outlines

The Ink Outlines shaders has another workflow than the rest. Here are the steps to get the Ink Outlines to work.

You have already a shader, like the Durink shader applied to your object.
And another material slot, so you have to materials for your object.
So, In the second slot , you give it the Ink Outlines material.
Next, is add a solidify modifier on your mesh, and in the modifier you flip the normals.
In the settings of the Solidify Modifier, you see: Material Index Offset. Set both to 1.
Adjust the thickness of the modifier.

Animating with the Inkwood Shaders.

I didn’t come to animating with the shaders myself, but I had contact with the developer and gave me the following suggestions:

The best way, how to use it for animation is to put #frame value to the seed attribute. This way, every frame will change the texture a bit. It works well with Durink – just be sure you change Line Distortion to anything else than 0 and then write #frame into the Line Distortion Seed slider. This may be also applied to the Goodpoint Shader. For the top-notch effect, I would recommend animating the attributes manually – texture scale, noise scale, and so on, just experiment, what is good for you. And the best effect is to manually key it only when the model moves, so it’s not epileptic without the actual animation. Baking is not supported in Eevee, so you have to cheat it like this, but the results are quite good (I am an animation student and I hope I can tell). Of course, the main point of the shaders is comic strip creation, but the animation is also very possible.