Cartoonish landscapes  

with

 

 

by S68 

who, in the real word answers to the name of Stefano Selleri 

www.selleri.org

 

selleri@det.unifi.it

 

 

22-02-2002 

 

INTRODUCTION  

Ok, folks, looks like some of you liked my last entry to the 

great F1 contest  Chaired by CurtiS. Image was meant to 
be cartoonish and funny. 
 
Someone even asked a tutorial to make images like this, 
so, here I am. My first tutorial. Please remember this!  

SCOPE 

Tutorial won't get in the car/driver modeling because 
they are really plain subsurfed objects with the easiest 

material you can make in Blender (go to the material 
window, set the colours, you're done. I never touched 
any other slider in this model for actors!) 
 
What you'll find here is how to make a cartoonish world 
around your actor(s). 
 

The world 

Toons have bold, highly saturated colours, with large uniform areas. Nothing really 

difficult to do in Blender. My word was a plain disk (Add a circle, go EditMode [TAB], fill it 
[SHIFT+F]) Disks are better than planes, because you get the border to be really all at 
the same distance from the camera, and this gives you a better horizon line. 
 
Add a new world, with 
a nice blending sky 
going from fairly Cyan 
to deep Blue. 
 
Add some mist too, just 
to blur the horizon. Not 
too much (start from 
far away) remember 

cartoons prefer sharp 
transitions! 
 
The disk should be a nice 
saturated green 
somewhat reflective but 
with an extremely low 
specularity, if any at all! 
 
Lights! Lights are an issue. 
GI would be best, but the classical way to GI is lengthy and - well - I didn't know it when 
I started blending this! So I just used a LightSpot, a ShadowSpot and some lamps 

around. 

 
The LightSpot (purple) is veeery wide (120°) 
energetic (2) and doesn't cast shadows. 
 
It is very wide so that the whole disk-world is 
illuminated uniformly. You may use a sun light, if you 
want. 
 
The ShadowSpot is much narrower, and only cast 
shadows. BufSize is maximum (2560) Samples=6 

Soft=3. This way you don't loose precious samples on zones of the scene where there 
are no shadows at all to cast! 
 
Camera is not far from cursor... So you may ask: "Hey, but with that spot how can sun 

and clouds be illuminated and looks so cartoonish?" Well, answer will come later. 
 
These spots only: Light world; make specular highlights, shadows and illumination on 
actors. 
 

Sky Objects 

Sun and clouds look flat and 
cartoonish... because they are flat! 
 

Switch to a view which is as 
orthogonal to the camera view as 
you can. 
 
Place a Bezier Circle, in EditMode 
[F9] subdivide it a couple of times. 
Start moving around vertexes. 
Remember to keep it flat! Bezier 
Circles are already flat. Don't go 3D 
 
To give the cloud its shape make a long straight bottom line then start playing with 
nodes. If you make the Bezier handles very asymmetric (one of the two handles very 

next to the control point, the other far away) then it is easy to give the desired cloudy 
shape to the curve. 
 
Sunrays are similar. This time I 
chosen to use a nurbs circle to 
start with, that's up to you! 
 
Good news are that, when 
rendered, these things 
becomes flat surfaces! 
 
Hence all the toonish tweak 

left is on material! 
 
Remember, you can want to play with lights, but Blender is so good at rendering that 
you will end up with something realistic. Not toonish! 
 
So, forget light. Play with the Emit slider. All sky objects in the scene creates their own 
light. You have no shadow problems, no lack of uniformity. Cloud Emittance in my 
scene is 0.3333, Sunrays and Sun emittance is 0.750. Sun itself is a UV sphere, not a flat 
disk, for dramatic enhancement (ad a bit of shading). 
 

Smoke 

Smoke, as usual, is done with particles. Problem is that it should look a solid, blocky 
smoke, like in cartoons, not a realistic one. 

 
We  cannot use the same technique 
for clouds. It would be much too 
sharp, some transparency here is 
nice. Provided that it is very limited. 
 
Smoke is generated by a simple, 
horizontal four vertex plane with 
particles.  
 
I found the settings here in the figure 

pretty nice, note the forces along X 

and Y to fake a light wind effect, and the randomness values to shape smoke properly. 
 
The smoke material should be a nice, 
dull, grey halo. Note that halo alpha is 
pretty high. This makes smoke nicely 
blocky without making it completely 
and hopelessly opaque. 
 
 
 
 

REFINING 

Final touches makes the 
difference. Some additional 
Shadow Spots might help. 
 

Beware! Shadow Spots have 
the unpleasant tendency to 
generate artifact rims of 
shadows! 
 
When you use them Keep 
SpotBl as high as possible 
and play with great care 
with ClipStart and ClipEnd. 
 
Some lamps (5 here) will 
help in faking GI on the actors without having to do real GI. 
 
Please note the two oblique  thick short lines... those are the clouds! And the small thing 
top of the cluster of lighs in the center, a bit to the left, within the road borders. That is 

the sun! Who as ever said that you must keep right distances and proportions?  It is 
important that they SEEM in the right place from the point of view! 
 
Ah, yes, and the oil leaking below is made by 4 squashed metaballs with an high Spec 
dark brow material... 
 
I intentionally not used toon shading and toon edge settings because I wanted the 
scene to look like modern cartoons, whith a limited 3D look, not completely flat, but you 
can experiment with both. Good tuts are around.