 Hello. Hello. I am Dylan Gu. I'm the founder of Dylan Gu studios You guys already know that because it's pretty obvious, but we do have a YouTube channel for those of you don't know We post on that channel a bunch of animations that we do and We have currently over a hundred million views and a million subscribers So we really enjoy doing what we do and pushing the boundaries on animation When we make stuff. So this is just a quick preview This is a show real that we did of some stuff that we did recently With the studio over the past a year and a half or two years or so We're really trying to push NPR specifically. So that's what this talk is about anime and NPR In blender in CG being able to really find a way to get that 2d feel in 3d as much as possible So I think our stuff is pretty cool huge props to the team I really believe in our team being something special. So hope you guys like what you see So What makes NPR look good in CG? There are two main elements a couple more, but the two main ones are characters and environments Characters are the main thing that clocks 3d almost immediately for most people That's why getting the characters right was a huge priority. So As you can see here, this is a model by rookie curry who is a fantastic modeler and artist She's also on our team and she made this model Callisto, which is actually available for you to download for For free. I believe for BNPR's fundraiser But this is a test animation that I did to see if we could really push that 2d boundary with characters And I think we did a pretty good job. She's incredibly talented. I did a little bit and that worked out and then we have of course environments so environments are something that a lot of anime actually uses already but Again, you can kind of tell it's CG. So we want to try to push that boundary a bit more and make it as convincing as possible So we have been developing a lot of custom tech if you were here for the talk yesterday We have a custom build of blender that focuses specifically on npr features This of course is mostly an evie And we can talk more about it in a bit, but what you see here is only possible with The the goo blender build. This is actually technically in viewport. This is rendered, but it looks the same in viewport Which is really really cool real time. It's beautiful. So huge props to the team there as well so How did we get here? Where did we start? This is definitely a combination of years of research and work And talent and at the beginning we had this This was actually a film I made for Well, actually it won a susanne award for six years ago So that was cool. But this is my very first npr project that I ever did It's a very simple project very simple characters And this is like the first tune shader I made and stuff like that And it kind of works, but at the same time, you know, you can tell it's 3d. You can tell it's sort of amateur It's got this sort of blobby shadow that gives away the geometry stuff like that These are things that you have to think about when you start doing npr this Is my the project that I never wanted anyone to see I It's cursed. I hate it. And yes, that is naked Santa Claus So He's also a bodybuilder and a jedi, but that's not important So this project was a terrible terrible Experience because I thought I could do some npr stuff with humans and with a simple tune shader on A muscular man. I got a base model and I put a tune shader on it and I was like, you know what that's going to look Good So I posted that online for some reason and then Um, I realized that there's a lot more to npr than just tune shaders and getting some pretty lights or whatever onto it Um, and so we started researching and trying to figure out exactly how do we get npr to look good? How do we get it to look like 2d? Not like 3d with a tune shader on it, but actually like 2d as much as possible We do like aspects of 3d, but here we are two years later trying to figure out a good balance between the two And a big part of that is finding amazing talent I think honestly our team is a culmination of some of the brightest and best blender users and Artists who understand this style in particular in the community, which I'm very proud of them in their work So after about two years of research, we've been working together on some secret projects Some stuff that we haven't shown yet Trying to get as convincing of a style as possible And we have This this is a project that i'm debuting here today for the first time. It's just a minute long film And it's just a proof of concept to see if it can look good if we can get characters to look good Enjoy Virus attack pattern successfully duplicated Antivirus protocol fully engaged Executing malware threat Thank you very much. I'm very proud of the team and what we accomplished. This was actually finished up yesterday So huge round of applause to them as well Yes, yes, please Yeah, so this was a proof of concept trying to figure out if we can get the characters to be convincingly 2d Even with a little bit of 3d elements. We don't have limited frame rates We have a lot of dynamic camera movements, which we enjoy as 3d animators and trying to find a balance between that And getting that 2d aesthetic was a challenge, but I think we did a pretty good job I think the character model looks fantastic. The animation really lets the character model shine and the effects are something that are Honestly out of this world. So Yeah, so that's a proof of concept that we did and the question is how do we get from naked santa To this girl her name is emily She looks amazing. I mean just look at that for a still frame. I think it's fantastic Rookie curry is a big aspect of that I think it'd be a lie to say that she didn't have a huge role to play in how convincing the aesthetic looks She is on twitter. If you if you haven't followed her you should She does a very good job at understanding how To get 3d to look like 2d as a 2d artist and a 3d artist She's able to combine those two worlds in a very convincing way And I have a lot to owe for her and she's been working with us for the past two years as well So huge round of applause for her. She's been working really hard on this as well So what does she do? She does a modeling of course, but she's not just a character modeler. She's a character expert. So she changes that To this So normals are a big thing Normals are the reason why a lot of geometry with tune shaders don't work You have to have a way to edit the normals to make them look less blobby like that So the blobbyness is something that geometry tends to have An effect on the shading in the shadows that gives a way that it's 3d So the way you do the way you Essentially convince people that it's not 3d is you remove the information of the geometry You take out the normals and you say i'm going to replace these normals with other normals that don't actually exist And it sort of approximates what a 2d artist would do You simplify a lot of things you imply a lot of shapes. You don't actually draw the shapes themselves So that's a huge help and I think a big part of why the characters look more convincing and a lot flatter a lot less blobby is what I like to call it Another thing that we do is line art. This is a big big thing for characters getting proper line art and convincing line art is extremely difficult You can see the normals here as well But you can also tell that there's a line art pass on emily here And this is done with grease pencil, but it's done through the line art modifier So it's fully automated. It's using an algorithm to generate the lines But of course there's a lot of tweaking in the settings and you have to make sure you have the geometry Capable of supporting that line art. However Once it's set up it works from all angles And the line art modifier in particular. I have a huge shout out for yiming lu who's been working on it It was originally called lamb pr if you guys know that name instead But the line art modifier for the grease pencil is a game changer We originally used freestyle But that one has a lot of great features The line art modifier has all those features plus intersections, which is huge because it hides clipping and I hate clipping so That's a good thing But also because it's grease pencil it has this amazing benefit of being able to be baked onto keyframes So you have this dynamic real time technically real time in the viewport line art that you can then Bake down into keyframes as a grease pencil Animation essentially and you can fix the line art in the viewport as you go if there's any errors If there's any sort of stray lines You can just go directly in there draw some new lines erase some lines and clean it up That is incredibly more efficient than having to export a separate pass into after effects and masking and stuff like that Especially with the fact that you don't have to worry about anti-aliasing because it's all rendered through the same pass in the end Anyway, so this is an incredibly powerful tool I have a lot to thank for this because I think it's incredibly Useful for what we need it for which is getting effective characters now Effects are a thing that I want to mention, but it is a very big topic So I won't be able to cover it all but generally speaking for those of you guys who are curious Our effects are mostly 2d But they're not 2d in the way you would expect we have a couple of variations We do have 2d cards That are just 2d if you look at that dust effect there on the bottom right of that left Image that dust effect is just a plane with an image sequence on it. That's been pre-drawn. That's pretty simple That pink smear right there is actually grease pencil. So we use grease pencil as well That's also 2d and then we have the Electric sparks on the head which are actually a mesh with a 2d image sequence projected onto it in a sort of dome Shape so we get a little bit of 3d shape there On top of that we also have a bunch of procedural animation that we do in the shaders To generate some noise and stuff like that to get a lot of like wind effects Which has been I mean very satisfying to watch in my opinion So huge props of the effects artists as well And then we have goo blunder which I mentioned already This is a big reason why we have a lot of the features that we do In that first of all blunder is open source, which is amazing And so we've been able to just take these Amazing foundational features and be like we just need a little bit of extra stuff a little bit of extra control in the shadows So what we've done here is we have a shader info node This actually breaks up the diffuse shader into four different passes We have the diffuse shading, which is just the shading no cast shadows no self shadows Then we also have the cast shadow separately the self shadows Which are anything that's cast by itself onto itself and then the ambient lighting So this helps us actually a lot with character shading as well But also with environments and other things so having that extra control is Incredibly important for getting the shadows that you want on an mpr character And then we also have a couple of the things We have light groups light groups are an evie They are currently in cycles as well, but we put them in evie because we need them in evie This is something that we actually carried over from blender internal Because blender internal did have light groups and I really enjoyed that And so I was like we need that so let's let's give that in And it's helped us have that extra control over for example having the face lit a little bit differently than the body Or separating it even further if you wanted to separate the hair or you wanted to separate the eyes You can group them differently and have so much control over that which is fantastic We also have the curvature shader. So the curvature shader is something that we've added for environments This is something that a lot of anime does Specifically Makoto Shinkai is a huge culprit for this He's the guy who did your name. You can see actually in the top right That is a screenshot from the movie and the bottom right hand corner. We've attempted to recreate that in 3d entirely And so that is of course Basically a viewport render and we have the curvature shader that is actually dynamically adjusting to the camera angles and stuff Like that as well as to the geometry And by using that we're able to recreate this sort of very simple effect But something that's actually relatively difficult to do without it for example We tried using bevel modifiers that got really heavy. This is something that is very simple to use and is now in our shader editor If you're curious technically the curvature shader is Works exactly the same way as the workbench one. We've simply ported it over to evie to give us that extra control Here's the viewport with some dynamic lighting which is one of the advantages of having a 3d scene We can have different camera angles different different lighting scenarios all in the same file This is another example of how the curvature shader works with a bit more of a dynamic sort of like angling You can kind of tell that the rim light of course is dynamic And we also have Different parts of the cube curvature being highlighted depending on which angle you're seeing it from and stuff like that This is another example of our environments. We have A lot of environments that we've made that we haven't shown off yet So I wanted to have a couple examples of exactly sort of how detailed we can make them And this one also takes advantage of the curvature shader quite a bit and we also have dynamic lighting And it's really cool because this is a scene for example in one of the projects projects We're working on where we need a lot of different camera angles And we're going to be reusing it a lot So for a 2d-esque production having a 3d background is A game changer because you don't have to redraw the backgrounds each time And then we have this so this is this last slide is actually A project that we're still working on and I wanted to show it to you guys because it's not finished yet I know that the emily project looked really good. I thought it looked really good and this project is Not going to look as good And I want you guys to know that We put in a lot of effort in these and and sort of like what we have to fight And you'll probably see somewhere similar things when you start working in mpr A lot of things breaking when you have these work in progress Projects so I'm going to show you guys what this is. It's not supposed to look like this But I hope you guys enjoy it. Anyway, um, this is a character named Alice and she's waking up in a cyberpunk world Changing our thoughts and they're getting closer and closer So these Freddy Krueger's I'm sorry dream detectives absolute nightmare fuel Those are never a simple as no one knows anything about these people found dead last week apparently These Krueger's on the case Krueger's still out on a loose pretending. They're only here to help us. They aren't helping people. They are here to solve crimes They're a government run at scyops division task with infill trading our minds with whatever that onerosyn plant really is It might be too late And if it is We're not waking up from this nightmare there you have Yeah, so that is a project that we'll be finishing up next week But as you can see it's got a little bit of work to do The line art is a little weird and stuff like that and the shading still needs some work But in the meantime as I finish up this talk, I want to remind you guys if you guys weren't here in the last talk Gooblender is open source now. So if you guys want to download the source code, you can it's right there Um, and we also have a patreon if you want to support further development of gooblender and further npr features Someone's getting a call Thank you But yeah, um, there was only one slide left anyway, uh, which is basically just to say thank you very much For being here and watching the talk. I really appreciate it. Hope you guys learned something