Faster, More Natural Hatch Material Renders

Faster, More Natural Hatch Material Renders

The Hatch Material is one of 4 Sketch & Toon textures for Cinema 4D. It’s basically a cloner for image textures, and it’s great to use when you want to simulate an image being drawn by pencil.

Normally you specify an image for the stroke, like this:

and then C4D uses that one stroke over and over again to build your image, like this:

That can be all well and good, but since it’s the same exact stroke it sometimes doesn’t have enough of that natural, organic feel you might want when simulating a pencil sketch. 

Here’s a tip, which I got from Liron Ashkenaz-Eldar’s talk about Sketch & Toon at the 2019 Siggraph Convention: instead of using a 1-stroke texture as a brush, use a whole page of brush strokes, which can give you something like this:

In this example, the ball and shadow were created using the texture below:

Brightness (specular hilight on ball, white on the disc below it) were created by essentially blowing out the texture with lights. And using a big texture cuts down on the number of times the image needs to be duplicated which saves rendering time too.

Part of it has to do with the look you’re going for, of course, but if you want something that looks pencil drawn, this tip will get you there quick.