I created this animation in Blender to see how the toon shader would look in motion. Below you will find more about how this animation was made.
Some still images to show the shader and scene details.
Making the animation (not tutorial)
First I created a foreground scene, with some 3d models made by me. The main actors, were animated using mocaps from Mixano.com. The animation purpose is to see the shader in motion.
Foreground scene full view
Background scene full view. For the background sky I created a huge sphere with flipped normals and applied an emission material. And some volumetric clouds.
I used three lights for the scenes, the Key Light (R), The Fill Light (G) and the Back Light (B). Each light must use different colours, Red, Green and Blue respectively. This setup allow us to controls the toon shader light/shadow appearance and direction. You can learn more about this shader here.
Bellow you can see two spheres, the left one have a white material, which show us the light colours reflected. And the right sphere is a 3d model example with the toon shader applied, showing the key light, the fill light and back light.
I am using the fill light to controls the top down cast shadow. And the others lights I need to rotate, depending on the cameras view to make every shot looks good.
These are the toon shader nodes
Shader nodes full view
This shader allow us to paint some details on the 3d models if we wish. But first, some uv mapping editing is required.
Park bench wood mask texture painted directly in Blender.
The same technique was used on trees....
... and clothes.
Some particles systems were used to create grass, rocks and some details on the road.
These are the volumetric clouds used on the background. Maybe some flat cloud images were better for render optimization.
Now the cameras animation. First, I chose a song to sync the shots. Bellow you can see the 26 cameras used in this animation on the foreground scene...
...and the cameras must be placed and animated on the background scene as well. Or just copy and past from one scene to another.
Almost done. Now I'll show the compositing I made to merge the renders and apply some nice effects.
First, I got the foreground and background renders...
Then, I needed to get the z-depth to apply some effects depending on the pixel distance from the camera.
Using the ColorRamp node I can adjust the distance color...
...and decrease the colours value a little bit.
And lastly, defocus the far pixels.
The composition render is created automatically on every frame.
Here is the finished animation.
Music: Clash by Caravan Palace