Eevee Toon Shader Shadows Looking Jagged and Choppy, everything is set to shade smooth

Question

I've tried every other solution on stack exchange but can't find much luck. Sometimes my toon shaders will have this choppy, angular look that isn't ideal. Here is what things look like rendered:

But things look fine in material preview mode:

Here is my material node set up:

And here are my scene shadow settings, these normally get the best results but don't seem to be helping much here:

Is there maybe something wrong with my lights? I'm not sure what else to try and it looks quite ugly lol.

Here is the project file if needed:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1QJ_5hKZkPkQdEylG5Uju48kfwrpZeEsL/view?usp=sharing

Thank you!

Answer 1

The reason why it doesn't look the same between material and rendered shading modes is simply because the material shading mode is by default not using your scene's lighting and world material. And even when it does, it is still a limited rendering method compared to the rendered shading mode. So the render can be drastically different.

For the jagged edges, I think it comes from your inverted hull method for making the mesh outline.

You used a solidify modifier to duplicate the mesh, inflate it, invert its normals, and assigned to it a material with backface culling and black material.

But you let its shadow mode to opaque, so it is still calculating shadows. Try setting it to None and it will look better:

On a different note:

Your toon lines shader could be simplified to this:

it would be the same as plugging a black emission shader, and faster to compute.

Similarly, your skin shader could also be simplified. Instead of usin two principled BSDF and two Shader To RGB nodes, which do the same thing, just use one of each and plug them in the ramp nodes. And since Principled BSDF is also a bit costly in terms of performance for what you do with it, you could also replace it by a simple diffuse BSDF: