 Hey, it's the BNPR show number two a celebration of stylized rendering on Today's show guilty gear excerpts secrets revealed organic looking freestyle lines and beautiful hair in hunk I impact third Cat Ninjin made a tutorial on how to make freestyle lines look more organic It is in Japanese, but you can still sort of make sense on how she did The goals are to number one make the line taper at both ends Don't taper it to zero though pens and pencils don't have lines that taper to a zero thickness Number two vary the thickness along the line, but don't overdo it or else the thickness will look weird on some of the shorter lines To do this you'll need to go to the freestyle line style panel the line thickness tab Select a long stroke modifier. It's very hidden After you have added the modifier change the mapping from linear to curve Set the min and max line thickness value and now play with the thickness ramp You can control the thickness by going up and down The left most and right most are the actual ends of the line Line chaining may break in unpredictable locations So make sure that both ends of your line have the same thickness That way your line doesn't suddenly become too thick or too thin when line chaining breaks and that is it You can find similar tricks in our the many secrets of npr part one mini course Or in the freestyle level up course. You can find these courses in our store And there's a link in the show notes Here's a tip by mandala motion on youtube use your 2d skills from other software to make 3d artwork If it is done well enough it can create very stylized art Do not neglect these 2d fundamentals like color shading silhouette positive and negative shapes and perspective In npr the border between 2d and 3d is very blurry hankai impact third is an action mobile game about a team of powerful female valkyrie warriors fighting hankai beasts Our main interest this time is on the hair design and shading The hair design is mostly three main parts with an optional fourth One the front bangs this can be very big or very small Two the sides this can be on top or below the front bangs Three the back part which can be one part with an optional fourth part such as braids bun or just a long flowing mane There are also the same hairstyles for the chibi characters The different parts of the hair are way more prominent But that you'll have to see for yourself You can go pretty crazy after understanding these designs It's kind of a mind blow knowing how many styles you can give them And now for more hair it's shading time The hair shading is very complex One a grayscale threshold to make the fake ambient occlusion The grayscale threshold is probably done using vertex color This threshold is used as a blending factor for lit and shadow Two some areas like the mane towards the neck are permanently shaded in the shadow area Three specular highlights are done using a texture map The texture map is a gradient map for variation when light hits from different angles Using min or max depending on the texture map to make a good looking cutoff Four also notice the light rig This is to avoid the shadow and lit area occurring in the middle of the hair mesh Now for the bonus point If you have a sharp eye you'll see that they're using half Lambert for the base shading Of course there are some vertex normal editing to fix some of the problematic areas Go download the game for android or ios and play it for the hair Animating peter porker is by video vergo on youtube He shows the animating process and the final result The best part of the process is how he makes the animation loop seamless It's pretty cool to see how he does it 313 experiments is a music video by jefferson nascimento using the music provided by the suicide laboratory band All the animations are done in blender There are many npr experiments in this music video So you might learn a thing or two go watch it Now it's time to celebrate npr artwork of the month Have very different feels to them The one by emma coach left uses a texture map to the screen space The one made by choco bow flow right uses a textured uv map to the surface of the mesh The one by emma feels very 2d while choco bow flows feels 3d Depending on your desired outcome. You may select one from the other There really is no right or wrong style This is a little old but newly discovered by a fellow npr artist pierre schiller The slide is about the process and design of the characters in guilty gear excerred by junia modemora of arc system works The slides are in japanese, but we've summed it up in the comments on our facebook group Some of the topics discussed in the slides are 1 Modeling for style and shading that is to say Modeling with shading and 2d result in mind One very striking thing is to not model based only on a front and a side view The presenter encourages rigging while modeling so that you can model from more angles 2 suppress and simplify facial features Suppressing means to really just simplify from the actual anatomy also for shading and animation reasons asymmetry everything The one thing that is discussed in the slides Is how eyes when viewed from a three-quarter view should not have the same mirrored mesh Instead the 2d projection from the anime will produce a more powerful and emotional impact And vertex normal editing on everything I guess you could have guessed that last one Vertex normal editing is very important On the last show we talked a bit about making a parallax interior This time Magrilia made a hardcore version super advanced So advanced that it hits the 16 layer texture limit for eeve So go play with those blend files. By the way, all this blend file sharing is super awesome Again, there's a link in the show notes The show is almost over, but you can go to these places for way way more npr If you like what you see, please consider supporting us via patreon And now calling all indie game devs with npr artwork come feature your games in this show If you know fellow game devs bring them on Use the show's contact form. Once again, all links are in the show notes Before we go, there's one last question. Do you know the algorithm for the half Lambert shader?