Comic Textures in Blender

I've played a bit with faking comic rasters/hatching and line art in Blender. There are numerous ways to implement this, and here's one.






The basic node setup for my technique is as follows:


Take a texture, align it with the view, scale, mix with a shader, use a threshold to make it black and white. I used Blender render (ie. not Cycles) to be able to use the output of a shader as an image, making combining it with the raster texture easier.

For outlines I used 2 linesets: black one, drawn inside, and white one drawn outside. Both have 'along path' modifier with simple ease in / ease out curve.

The texture used is simple:

The raster texture can be of course more complex, and you can get control over the density of lines by making them different shades of grey. This sort of maps can be created in Blender itself by making a 'landscape' and giving it a material that is coloured as a function of z-axis.

This map could be used to draw light areas with vertical lines, darker ones with crosshatch, and darker yet with diagonal hatching added:

Here's the classic dot pattern, and its application on a gradient:

In order to make the fake hatching follow the contours of the object, just UV map the texture:

To get flat raster, just crank up the mix node ratio:

For Cerebus, I used also a 'Distance from Camera' modifier for the line thickness, making nearby lines ever so slightly thicker.