Halftone Lighting

Premise and End Result

I wanted to make a custom lighting model that mimics the halftone dotted pattern of comic books with how the lighting is rendered.

The end result achieves this, with a screen-based halftone pattern, ensuring that the pattern has consistent sizing no matter the size of the texture the material uses, or the object it is applied to.
The CLM also allows for blending multiple light sources, with the blended result having the same halftone pattern as the shadows.

Process

I first created a regular lighting shader, using Lambert diffuse, Phong specular, and others. Then, I created a halftone pattern using a voronoi noise pattern, making the dots size screenspace dependant. The shadows calculated from the previous calculations were then smoothstepped between adjustable values, those values determining where the dotted halftone pattern begins, and where the dots have grown so big that the object is fully encapsulated in shadows. The values being adjustable allowed artists to easily alter the shadow behaviour based on how the lighting should react to any given material.