 This show is brought to you by these happy patrons. Hey you beautiful people out there, welcome to the Blender non-photoreal show! The full name is always a mouthful, so find yourself a comfy seat because we have an epic show for you this time. The highlights are, first painting with polygons, old is new again, second creating low res and low poly assets, and third. At long last, we have beer. Time for the news. The author of The Book of Shaders, Pat Patricio GV, made an add-on hacking the texture data, meaning we can now write GLSL fragment shaders as textures to display mathy and trippy procedural textures. If you're the more coding inclined type of person, you can find his add-on named GLSL Texture on GitHub. Link is also in the show notes. This next news item is ancient, thus it is new again. There's been some discussion in the community of using geometry to make painterly renders. It's based on a paper called Painting with Polygons by Isaac Botkin in 2009. The idea is simple, first we need a few mesh objects of the same shape, and then we displace the vertices of each mesh using a texture. When you render the mesh, you're actually rendering many transparent objects. So these vertex displacements will create the illusion of multiple stroke painting. This simple idea does not stop here though. Just add a textured normal, and then you get painterly strokes. You can also use time, micro displacement, and motion blur to get the same results. So it's very fun and a great introduction on how hacky some NPR styles are. Go look at the research paper and the video, plus the SIGGRAPH talk. Our first tutorial comes from Louis Dumont, and this is for all you low spec hardware enthusiasts. In his tutorial he introduces how to make a simple low poly mesh, and then proceeds to paint the mesh with a very small texture. The key points to take away from here are to make a pixely texture, the texture interpolation must be set to closest, also known as nearest neighbor, in most software. If your model is symmetrical, mirror the mesh while modeling. If you want to paint, apply the mirror modifier so that when the UV mesh is unwrapped, you'll have the other side of the mesh to paint as well. Your UV islands must not stretch too much from one to the other, there are tools in the UV editor to help you with that. The cool thing about painting a low res texture is that you can paint light and shadow on a different texture, meaning you can turn on and off the light, change the color of the AO texture, and much more. At Moldgado, on Twitter, has been doing that for years. You'll have to check out his Twitter account for countless artworks. Anyways, go watch this tutorial because it's just that much fun. And here's a fun one, also for the low spec hardware enthusiasts. How to export Krita illustrations into Blender by Watchtribe. You must have a properly layered painting in Krita to start with. Each layer must have a number prefix followed by the layer name. The number is for the order of the layer when importing into Blender. Then export the layers as individual PNG images. In Blender, use the import image as plain add-on to import the images. Import them as shadeless and set Z plus as the offset direction, with a small offset value for each image plane. What you do after that will be up to you. You can rig and then animate the mesh, or just use the image plane as is. If you find Blender's texture painting is limited or too heavy for your hardware, doing the painting in Krita is a nice way to get a result faster. Give it a try and you'll be surprised by how much NPR you can get from this workflow alone. We have a few more bonus tutorials which we think will be worth your time. The first is how to make a stylized tree by Aki Shacks. This will involve the particle system and the vertex normal editing. The result is pretty stunning. The second is a Blender compositor outlines by Erito Kayo. This is a very basic but a good start to help you understand how to use depth to find an outline. And the last one is the basic pixel art Twitter thread by Atfrogue. This tutorial is a fast read and it's easy to understand. Now for some community updates. We have over 2,500 new subscribers so thanks for all your subs. Also a bird was telling me that there are about 70% of you who are not subscribed. If you cannot get enough of this stylized rendering you can also join us on Facebook, Discord and Twitter. And now for some exciting NPR development. The NPR community project BEAR has started development. Currently the back end of BEAR, or MALT, is being developed by Miguel Pozo. For those who are outside of the loop here's a quick primer. BEAR stands for Blender Extended Expressive Renderer. This project was initiated way back in 2012 and it's been collecting donations from the community. If you've ever bought anything from us you've already contributed to making this render engine. The elephant in the room right now is the question. How is BEAR better than what we have? Before anything else we have to understand the problem. First, extending NPR features in EV and cycles is hard. There are many rejected NPR features in Blender's repo. Not that these render engines couldn't incorporate NPR features but they have to keep industry standards to make sure that files from Blender will auto-translate into other software like game engines, the emphasis on the auto-translate part. We'll get back to that. Second, the nodes are not user-friendly and not easy for beginners. You have to understand the data input, the data type, and how to manipulate the input to get the required output. Even for something as common as a rim light requires some node wrangling. The result of that is the third problem and that is making NPR materials from these render engines are slow. BEAR aims to solve these problems. BEAR is easy to understand since everything is feature-based. If you want a rim light, you have a rim light. You don't like this version, then you can have another version. BEAR is fast to use. All of your NPR features stack in a layer form. It is also flexible since the shader graph is what you define it to be. BEAR is coded to be extendable. Every BEAR shader is made from code. Adding and modifying shaders are encouraged. No more NPR features stagnation as we've seen in the past decade. Another benefit of BEAR is the shaders being purely coded, so that you can use the shader code in most game engines with little to no modification. Coming back to the material auto-translate part, when you have the code of the shaders, the material's auto-translation problem is not as big of an issue as many have worried. So here's a cool fact. BEAR is so flexible, you could build a photoreal render engine on it. Now returning to the present. Currently, we have a fundraising campaign to help out the BEAR development. The money is divided into two portions. The first is that funds will go for the development of Malt, the back end of BEAR, and the second funds for the development of the front end of BEAR. Every two weeks, there will be a batch of blend files from the community. And you can buy these blend files and 100% of your money minus the fee cuts will go directly to fund the project. At the time of making this video, we are actually about 40% funded. So if you have cool blend files, you can contribute them for the fundraising campaign. We want your stylized food scene, landscapes, cityscapes, props, characters of any style, and more. Contributing your blend file is easy. You only have to fill in this form and we will get you sorted. If you can code GLSL shaders, then we want you as well. If you're more advanced, you can help spot bugs in Malt's code. Fill in this same form so that we can keep track of everyone's contribution. These are artworks that have been contributed to the fundraising already. BottleChan by JustAsk, CocoaMagician's house by AtEvaPrimudria, an epic sunset scene by I'mGalad, End of Destiny by Ulf3000, Bunko by AtMolgado, and Colen's Cat by AtTurWearLive. You must get these brilliant blend files and see how they made them. They're really great. And we want to thank you for your past, present, and future contributions. Your contributions of any amount and form will define beer's destiny. And beer's destiny is to be the best NPR engine that ever existed. Oh, and you can find out more about beer using this link. Aha! It's time to marvel at the artworks of the month. These yummy watermelon slices are by Sonon. There are two magical parts to make everyone yearn for a slice of watermelon right now. The first is the colors used to bring the emotion yummy. The second is that many faces on and in the watermelon are single-sided, meaning that when the view changes, the visibility of the mesh changes. This same method is also used in the car scene by Barbo shown earlier. But yummy watermelon render is yummier, and we want watermelon slices now. End of Destiny is an animation by Ulf3000. By the time you view this show, the blend file for the whole scene will be in the beer development fundraising batch number two. The scene is created from many grease pencil objects and plane objects. It's a simple scene, but the amount of care put into the animation is quite respectable. So get the blend file if you have not. Nescafé Hong Kong is an animated advertisement commissioned by Nestle Hong Kong. The colors in this animation are just wonderful. This part requires dynamic 3D camera movement and blender is used. A few famous names like at Pochi 1989, at Rio Timo, and at Kizuhira were involved in making these shots. The first shot is planned. Then a rough 3D projection of the objects in the scene is made. Animated props are introduced. A mannequin is used to aid the character animation. The mannequin is then swapped out with grease pencil keyframes. Then the animation is cleaned up in Clip Studio paint. The background was also refined for the shots. There are many artists involved in the production and you can see the full list in the video description of that advertisement. Links to all the NPR greatness seen in the show are in the show notes. The link to the show notes is in the video description. It's full of NPR greatness. These are some of the awesome people keeping the show running for everyone. Please thank them kindly. You can also help offset the cost for creating this show. You can hit our Patreon page for that. Before we go, one last question. What blend file will you donate to support the beer development fundraising?