In trying to create a 2D cel animation look, I’m using BI’s Toon Materials (and Freestyle, naturally!)
However, if you look at most all cel animation, the colors only have two tones: the base tone and then one for shading. But I cannot limit the colors to just two in Blender, no matter how I play around with the Toon Material values. Does anybody have any suggestions on how to achieve this? Thanks as always.
Hi 
Looking at your render I don’t think it’s the materials that are the problem, more the difference in light intensities. I’m not too sure about how you’ve got your lighting set up, but you can make them all the same strength and disable the falloff so they will always give a constant brightness. That should basically give you a sort of “on or off” look for his shading. Also I’m not completely “au fait” with cartoon shading but I’m pretty sure that most only have one light source to simplify it all. Don’t quote me on that and correct me if I’m wrong
To disable falloff on the lamps by the way, go to the light’s settings and then under falloff, change the type to “lin/quad weighted”, and change both values to zero. And then ensure all lamp energy values are the same(if you do have more than one).
The only problem I encountered with this setup is when the light from more than one lamp intersected, causing a brighter patch. Again I could only fix this by using one lamp.
The final thing I’m going to say, is if you do want more than one source of light for different objects you can always use light groups (in the object material properties, under Options) to specify certain lights for one object and others for another. And play around with the “exclusive” option to make it so only that one object receives that light’s light.
Hopefully somewhere in this post is something that works
Good Luck with it,
Jamie
Jamie,
Thanks a lot for the detailed, multi-faceted reply. Having exhausted all Material options of achieving the two-tone color effect, I had already started playing around with the Lamps when you posted this reply. And the results are very promising, for sure. However, as you noted, there are often still brighter spots (especially when there is more than one Lamp). So it is not perfect. But I will play around with all the additional Lamp properties (such as “Falloff”) and see whether I can get it perfect.
I will go ahead and mark this thread as “Solved”, although if there is anybody else with ideas (or definitive solutions), please don’t hesitate to post them.
You could also use nodes, combine 2 shadeless materials (each are the colors for the shading) using mix, the factor controled with a 3rd material that’s its white and for high contrast put a color ramp between the white material and the factor input of the mix node. There you go! Limitation: all light sources will end up treated as white lights for this node material.
