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Giving your models a stylized black outline in EEVEE

Figure 1: examples of black outlines around some simple shapes.

A black and possibly ‘cartoony’ or ‘toon-like’ style border around your models is a nice way to make them stand out with a bit of character. Note that the setup used below works with the EEVEE renderer, but not Cycles.

Step 1: Setting the scene and viewport

Figure 2: changing the viewport to Rendered

Start with the cube you always get with a new file in Blender. And you can switch the Viewport shading to Rendered (see Fig. 2), so we can see the results.

Step 2: Materials properties

Figure 3: Adding a second material.

Next we add a second material to the cube, see Fig. 3:

  1. Go to the Material tab in the properties editor
  2. Click on the + sign to add a new material slot
  3. Click on New to add a new material (we name it "Rim material")
  4. Under Surface, change the surface of the new material to Emission
  5. Set the Color to Black. Or anything you want of course :)
  6. Tick the Backface Culling option under Settings. In step 3.3 below you we see why we tick this property
  7. Set the Shadow Mode to None. We do not want the border we are making to cast a shadow on the cube.

Step 3: Adding a modifier

Figure 4: adding a solidify modifier.

The last thing we need to do is add a solidify modifier, see Fig. 4:

  1. Go to the Modifiers properties tab and add a Solidify modifier. The Solidify modifier takes the surface of any mesh and adds depth, thickness to it. In essence, we're creating our black outline using a thickened version of the original Cube object.
  2. Set the Thickness to -0.04 m, or another value that gives the look that you want. This will set the thickness of the black border. When using a negative value here the black border extends outwards around the object, while a positive value will cause the black border to go inwards on top of the object.
  3. Enable Flip, under the Normals section. This will orientate the normals of the faces added by the modifier to point inwards. Together with the backface culling, we set for the material, this means you only see the material on the inside of the faces that are added by the modifier.
  4. Set the Material Offset, under the Materials section, to 1. This tells Blender to use the second material, in the list of materials of the object (see the list in Fig. 3), for the geometry added by the solidify modifier.

I hope this was helpful and that you will be creating crazy Kirby characters soon… or something more serious of course.

Cheers, Ben

Last update: 28 August 2024 11:08:44 •