Cinema 4D Tip: Production Halftone and Crosshatch Workflow for Cinema 4D

Quick ways to build production-ready halftone and crosshatch looks in Cinema 4D that hold up in animation and print.

Crosshatch with Sketch and Toon (fast, art-directable)

• Enable Sketch and Toon: Render Settings > Effects > Sketch and Toon. Add a Sketch and Toon tag to key objects if you need selective control.
• Create a Sketch Material. In Shading, choose Hatch. Add several hatch layers at different angles (e.g., 0°, 45°, 90°, 135°) and assign brightness thresholds to each layer.
• Set Space to Object for stable, non-sliding strokes on moving cameras; use Screen for UI-style or 2D illustration looks.
• Use Cel shading (Shading > Cel) to quantize luminance into clean tone bands that your hatch levels can target consistently.
• Add subtle Jitter/Noise within the hatch material to break uniformity and minimize banding in large flat areas.
• Anti-aliasing: in Render Settings, favor Best AA or higher Min/Max values. In Sketch materials, increase Oversampling for crisp lines at 4K and print.
• Multipass: enable Sketch and Shading passes to fine-tune the balance in compositing. Save as 16-bit or 32-bit for smooth grade. Hardware, licenses, and learning resources are available at NOVEDGE.

Halftone dots with MoGraph (resolution-independent, animated)

• Build a dot grid: Cloner in Grid Array, child a small Disc (n-gon) or Cylinder (low height). Set render as Geometry or instances for speed.
• Add a Plain Effector with Fields. Insert a Shader Field and load your grayscale source (baked lighting, AO, or an image). For screen-space mapping, try Camera Shader in the Shader Field.
• In the Plain Effector, enable Scale Uniform and drive it with the Field. Invert if needed so darker areas make larger dots. Clamp the remap curve to avoid dot inversion/flicker.
• Quantize the Field (Remapping > Quantize) to get stepped densities like print screens. Add a tiny Random Field to prevent moiré.
• For color halftone, duplicate the Cloner three times for C, M, Y (optional K as a uniform fill). Slightly offset each grid and rotate dot angles (e.g., C: 15°, M: 75°, Y: 0°) to mimic print screening.
• Render outlines off for a pure dot look, or combine with Sketch lines for a hybrid comic style.

Look-dev and stability tips

• Prefilter textures in the Shader Field (Filter shader) to avoid buzzing in motion. Keep dot size above 2–3 pixels at final resolution.
• Use Takes for quick A/B between crosshatch and halftone variants, and save presets in the Asset Browser for reuse.
• Combine with Ambient Occlusion and Curvature maps to stabilize tone separation before hatch/dot mapping.
• If lines/dots shimmer, raise Subdivision Steps for animated scaling, or bake MoGraph to keyframes before final renders.

For plugins, licenses, and expert advice on Cinema 4D, Redshift, and Sketch and Toon, connect with NOVEDGE. Need tailored guidance for your pipeline? Start a conversation with the NOVEDGE team and streamline your NPR workflow.