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Sketch and Toon Line Thickness Relative to Camera
Hi, I’m trying to control the thickness of these road lines rendered by Sketch and Toon relative to the distance from the camera at any given point.
What I can’t seem to do is to make line thickness decay uniformly along the Z axis. I’ve experimented with settings under the thickness tab in the sketch mat, or materials window, but still no success. All the lines rendered from splines. This is the result I’m trying to replicate:
It was made with the same paths as the road in C4D, but rendered as an Illustrator file in After Effects.If anyone has some insight, I’d be extremely grateful. Thanks!
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11 Replies
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I assume you are using the Distance modifier under thickness. What do you have Range set to? I’m guessing you are going to have to set it to Custom and work out what the distances are.
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Thanks so much for your reply, Brian! I am using the distance modifier, and I have experimented with custom ranges. Doing this changes the lines somewhat, but for some reason, the outside and middle lines always change thickness at different rates along the Z axis.
Perhaps the strangest thing (and maybe an indication of something I’m missing) is that no combination of settings seems to have any effect on the line thickness of the rectangular outlines (dashed road lines). The only way I’m able to effect them is to bring the max range way down, which cuts them off at a certain distance.
Here’s a link to the project file in case that’s helpful:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B85Q5pZAxubuTjM3OTRkWlY4c00/view?usp=sharing -
a linear spline in the Thickness/Distance controller is not good visually at that viewing angle, a cubic-ish one looks better.
The different rates at which the short and long spline parts fade can be fixed by changing the spline’s Intermediate Points to Uniform. I did testing on Path.3 as it seems to have most of the structure but makes the test simpler and the file smaller.11133_linethicknesstest.c4d.zip
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Thanks so much Brian! The splines’ intermediate points was the thing I was missing.
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So the intermediate spline points solution is helping big time, but it also introduced a new issue which I can’t seem to resolve. When the spline’s intermediate points are set to uniform the object looses some of it’s original shape–it goes from the original shape:
to this:
I’m trying to find a way to anchor the original spline points and then set intermediate points to uniform, so that they work around the anchored points. Is this possible? -
where are the vertexes? There are a few points that stay sharp and most go round, that should only happen if there are not vertexes at the corners… How was the spline made? Can you post it?
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Are the vertexes the points where two spline segments join? If so, I believe there are vertexes at the corners. Here is the spline in point mode:
and here is the project file: 11188_map.c4d.zipI made the map in Illustrator using paths and the appearance panel, then reduced all the lines to simple paths on one layer, then merged the illustrator file into C4D.
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I am not seeing the same behaviour with the Map.4 spline when I change from Natural to Uniform Intermediate points the corners stay the same (nice sharp corners)
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Ah, one thing I should have mentioned: after switching to Uniform Intermediate points, the corners (and the rest of the shape) did stay the same, but only while in point mode. If line/polygon/object mode is selected, or if the scene is rendered, the changes become apparent. Did the project file behave differently on your end, Brian? If so, perhaps I’ll start checking program settings.
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now I see it, in my world the vertices should be solid points where the spline has to go (at least for all curve types except B-Spline) …”The interpolated curve always passes through the vertices.”… it says in the manual for all curve types but the b-spline.
I raised the Uniform Intermediate Points to 64 and it looks pretty good but it’s slow to render. Otherwise I can’t tell where the problem comes from other than maybe it’s the source spline but that’s a guess.
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