I separated Line Art and Color Art in Node View so that the light effects wouldn’t visually affect the line art layer.
For some reason, this causes line art from lower layers to show up over drawings from higher layers.
For instance, if I have the layers ordered from highest to lowest: Head → Neck
then the line work of the neck is showing up OVER the colour art of the head.
When I change the Nodes so that the Colour Art and Line Art aren’t separated (i.e. Group connecting directly to Composite without being isolated through “Line Art” and “Colour Art”), the layer ordering problem goes away. But obviously, it prevents me from achieving the desired lighting effects.
What might I be doing wrong now? I’ve verified again and again that my Line Art and Colour Art are properly set up & cleanly separated in the Drawing layers. I’ve also made sure that the layers are in the proper order. So I’m not sure why there is an ordering problem when the Colour Art and Line Art are isolated like this.
I’m out of ideas here… Thank you for any help.
Edit: To summarize my question, how do I set up my nodes so that the result will render in this order (from lowest to highest): Colour Art, Light Shader applied only to Colour Art, and then Line Art (so that Line Art isn’t affected by Light Shader) without the Line Art appearing over layers that it shouldn’t be.
What prevents the line of the neck to be over or mixed with the line of the head or other layers’ lines superimposed is the colour art layers. For instance, the colour of the head covers the line of the neck naturally because it’s on top. If you mix the line art from all layers together you’ll have them superimposed over the colour. That is, all existing line art will be visible, without anything (colour art) to cover it.
The effect you want to achieve would work straight away with just one layer, for instance in traditional animation, with only a line art and colour art sublayers, with the whole character. But even then, if, for instance, you separate an arm to animate while the body is still, you will have the same problem.
One way to solve the problem is applying the effect layer by layer, inside the group, so that the colour art of the layer that’s on top - for instance, the head over the neck - will always cover the lines you don’t want to see. This might not be very practical if you have a lot of layers and might make the scene heavy with the same effect applied to many layers. Another possible solution is to use cutters inside the group so that the line that is used for the effect is cut by the layer on top. So you’d need to connect a cutter from the colour art of the head to cut the line art of the neck and so on on all required layers.
