 The show is brought to you by these lovely people. Hey there you lovely NPR enthusiasts, and the highlights are, Malt has EV nodes, how to make rain with geometry nodes. And last, O2, 2D in meat space. Welcome to the BMPR show, a celebration of stylized rendering. So I would like to start off today by saying that we are deeply saddened by the passing of a friend, Daniel Lu, or better known as Dan Git, on Discord. He was a big part of so many people's lives on the server, and he's just kind of one of those larger-than-life persons. This show was supposed to have his voice over. We had planned to do the recording setup and have time for his recording, but we will never have his voice, unfortunately. So let's celebrate Dan's wonderful life with his artworks. I wrote your name in the sand, but the waves washed it away. I wrote your name in the sky, but the wind blew it away. So I wrote your name in our hearts. And that's where it will always stay, always. Jessica Blade Rest peacefully, Dan. Let's not let the celebrations stop. Here are the artworks of the month, Malt Shading Essentials by Colupsy. It's a plugin for Blender Malt that enables an Eevee-like workflow. It has all these familiar and yummy nodes. Why yummy? Because nodes equal noodles. Please update to the latest Maltz development branch and follow the installation guide closely. We hope this will ease the transition from Eevee to Malt while we're still working on the beer UI. Please check GitHub repositories and report any bugs you encounter. Bulsom Direct for June 2022 is showcasing indie games. There are over 100 wholesome indie games on display and a lot of NPR inspiration to go around. You'll find familiar faces from your favorite stylized artists. It's a must-watch. Before we start, here's a note about the tutorial segment. Please understand that this segment is supposed to be simplified and summarized. We will show you the thinking process and tell you the reason for the decisions to go with the setup. We omit a lot of info like variable types, the full logic behind the setup, and the actual coding. For details and brain-numbing info, please refer to the original tutorials. Our goal in this segment is to let you dip your toes into different NPR topics before committing your precious time to watch. Research and actually use the knowledge from the tutorials. With that out of the way, let's continue our journey with custom normal editing by a version of reality. In Part 6, we handle how to get really clean UV. To get really clean UV, we have to close air gaps and reduce distortion by using both proximity transfer and ray casting. Which is best to use depends on the shape of the mesh you're working with. Next, we use a flattened UV mesh for complex transfers. We don't have to worry about multi-layered normal transfers when the UV and the UV flattened mesh line up perfectly. Multiple normal transfers will just work nicely when distortion is solved. A plus, this tutorial will teach you a good way to get UVs in general. And why are we focused on UVs in a series about normals? Well, they're a good way to preview the transfer distortion, even if the setup will later be used for other data. And once we have clean UVs, we can use them for all future transfers by doing those transfers on meshes set to their UV position. With all of that prerequisite knowledge outlined, let's see the steps. For the first step, we don't have to get the cleanest UV unwrapped. This is done when we have a simple setup and do not have to add details. We have two objects, first the head, which is the target mesh. And the sphere, this is the source. First, in geometry nodes, get the sphere. Raycast the sphere normal to the head. This is to remove the majority of the distortion. Triangulate the mesh to solve mesh interpolation at the mirror joint. And then transfer the nearest head position to sphere. This solves some of the distortion and the middle of the nose issue. Then transfer the nearest face interpolation of the normal from the sphere to the head. Then followed by a transfer index of the position of the head to the sphere. Lastly, use the original geometry and the UV will be perfect-ish. That's the UV setup. So now let's introduce normal. In previous shows, capturing normals is relatively easy from the sphere. We use the captured normal after we have transformed the head. The rest is similar to our setup when we got our clean UV. When we need to add shading details by layering multiple custom normals, we need to flatten the UV setup. We have two objects, first the head, the target mesh, and then second the face mask, which is the source mesh which has a UV texture. First we have to apply the clean UV from the previous geometry node setup, or make a new UV that is also clean-ish. With the clean UV on the head, we can transfer the face mask's UV map to it. The head is then flattened to that UV map. Flattening to a UV map is merely setting its position in world space to be its position in UV space. Then it is necessary to split edges to have the flattened head to not look like a mess and not connected to the real head. To make the flattened head mesh look perfect, we have to fix the middle mirror part. Refine the air gaps near the eyes using a raycast setup and edge shape keys to help smooth jagginess on the edge flow. With that, we have a good enough mesh to layer multiple custom normals. And that will be the next part. Please subscribe to get the summary in the next show. The next tutorial is how to set up an anime 2D cutout animation by Levi Magany. Get a 2D reference cutout scene you want to make 3D. Import the reference into Blender. Add a 2D curve object, remove all the points, then add Use Draw Curve Tool or Curve Pen Tool to rough out all the layers. The center point moves the fill location while the two handles at the sides control how each side curves to the center point. You can change the handle type from vector aligned or free. With vector and free handle types, we can make sharp corners. We'll let you figure out the other handle types. Now you can adjust the curve resolution, subdivide the curve, dissolve curve points, and or mirror the curves. Start a new object by duplicating previous objects to retain all the settings done previously. Each object should have a gap so that we can add the ambient occlusion effect later. For the material setup, change View Transform to Standard. Make a new Diffuse Material and sample the color from the reference if you want to steal those colors. We won't judge, you do you. For Bloomy objects, add a material with an Emission shader with High Strength, then turn on Bloom. To add AO, turn on Ambient Occlusion and set it until it looks good. To animate the hair, convert the curve objects to mesh, then add a Wave modifier. Wait Paint the hair to make the wave influence less towards the hair. The same thing can be done with all the objects you want to animate. You may want to play with it and animate curves as well. And finally, you can render your 3D cutout animation. Profit! Please watch the original tutorial because we all met many details to keep the length of the show manageable. The third tutorial is Rain Scene, Version 2, by Narita Horuka. The Rain Scene is an improvement from the earlier tutorial which you can find on their channel. There are three main parts. One, the Rain Splash. This is done using Geometry Nodes. Two, the Water Ripples on the Wet Surface, or the Rain Flow as mentioned in the tutorial. And this is done on the material. And third, the Rain Particles via the Particle System. We will focus on the first two since Particle Rain is well covered. They already have a tutorial on it. Rain Splash Collection consists of three parts. First, the Horizontal Splash. Second, the Vertical Splash. And third, the Ripples. These are animated textures that can be either an image sequence or a video. To generate points, use Distribute to Points on Faces node on the cube. Then set the points on the geometry. Offset the points using a Noise Texture. To animate the points, drive the W value on the Noise Texture using a simple frame driver. Divide the value to control its speed. To preview the Rain Angle towards the surface, add an Instance to Points node at a cone as the instance object as a preview. To align the cone towards Z direction and mixing with the original direction, we use the cube's Normal and Align Euler to Vector node onto the rotation of the instances. To vary the size of the instances, connect a Random Value node to the scale of the instances. Now add the three Splash objects. Each object will have their own Aligned Euler to Vector and Instance to Point nodes. Then join the instances with the Join Geometry node. Next is exposing the parameters in the GN node group to set up the Rain Splash. We'll let you watch the full tutorial because there is a lot. Rainflow, also known as the Surface Water Ripple, is made as a material. For the glassy water surface, set Veroni Texture as the height of the bump. Then use that as the Normal of a Glass Shader. Use the Shader to RGB to convert the Glass Shader to Color as the input emission of the principal BSDF. To distort the 4D Veroni, add a Noise Texture after it. On the Mapping node, separate the input for Location, Rotation, and Scale. To show the water pattern after removing the Texture Coordinate node, add Materials Geometry node and link Position to the Mapping's Vector. Tweak the Scale's Z input to make the water run along stripes vertically. Now, expose all of the input from the node group so that we do not have to dive into the node tree just to set up the flowing water. And finally, add a Color Ramp after the node group to fine-tune the flowing water effect. Now combine all three parts. Water Splashes from the Geometry node, Surface Flow from the Material, and Rain from the Particle System. It's a complex setup but it's really nice. We also have this old Rain Shader made by Aquapolo on our download page, if you fancy something simpler. Before we move on to the next segment, we also want to give Ennis NND a shout out for the Anime-style Environment Modeling Timelapse video series. From the Studio Who Brought Us, Land of the Lustrous, and Beastars, Studio Orange brought us a thrilling short movie home. The year is 2124. Christopher was on a Mars Research Expedition. He found a missing commercial vessel from Earth and searched for survivors. A lot of action and a must-watch. Indie Anime Botu by Goshu. This is epic and fun to watch. Photoreal meets NPR so perfectly. The moral of the story, don't throw away your artworks. They might come back to haunt you. Or maybe just draw a nice waifu before throwing the paper in the bin. Dragon Ball Gohanverse, Episode 10 by Daiya Tomodachi. Doing the same thing and expecting different results is the definition of insanity. Oops, just spoiled that episode. Sorry, there, Dai. Well, it's not the end quite yet. Though a lot of tears were shed in the making of this show. As always, please visit the show notes for more NPR greatness. Plus, please use the hashtag BNPR to make your artworks and tutorials visible to us. Who knows, they might get featured in the show. And now, for the most important part, this show is made possible by these kind-hearted people. Please thank them kindly. Before we go, one final question. Which latest NPR tutorial topic interests you the most?