Thank you! Yes - I think that's a start, but I need a bit more direction, if you can help!
This guy - Eran Hilleli is a great representation of what I'm hoping to do.
I have low poly models, but I don't want to have shadows directly follow the rough geometry. Look at how the light passes smoothly over the face without making each large face of the mesh super obvious.
More examples:
The gradients:
The soft shadows and the haze:
And one more for good luck:
Just wondering if you might be able to hone in more closely on how to achieve this kind of shader aesthetic.
And here's an example of what I don't want:
Notice how the light and shadows show exactly where every face of the mesh is. Not subtle. Not a bad aesthetic, but not what I'm looking for.
Indeed, use a ramp shader in which you use hard transitions from one colour to the next.
If you want to use Arnold, which does not support the ramp shader (as far as I know); you can use for instance a aiStandard, from the aiStandard you pipe one of the color out components through a remapValue node into a the V coord of a ramp texture node (delete the placement node), from which you pipe the output in an aiUtility node set to 'flat' shade mode. In the ramp you can set your colours.
See screenshot for the shader node graph and the result.
I Ran into the same problem.
the answer is easier then you think
Heran Hilleli Examples shows that he uses Spot light and not one with soft edges - like area or point
and that keep the sharp light edge
Example - on the right I put Spot light/On the left side there is point light
