 This show is brought to you by these happy patrons. Hello to the Ghibli fans everywhere! Welcome to the BNPR show! A celebration of stylized rendering. We have a lot of Ghibli related topics for you today and the highlights are procedural water ripples, vertex groups for shadow shapes, and Ghibli art styles you can do right now inside of Blender. Before that, let's get started with the news. Hashtag GreeceOf2020, the tiny sketching jam initiated by Chris McFaul, aka United Filmdom Limited, on YouTube has just ended. Every day for five days a new topic was announced. Everyone went grease pencil frenzy crazy and here are the results. Shockingly impressive! So go have a look at this video. Now tutorial time. This first tutorial is Procedural Water Ripple by Mauricio Heberli. There are four parts to create a stylized pond. Number one, the water depth color is made from a gradient node set to quadratic sphere on a generated texture coordinate. A color ramp for the water color is added. This can also be done by using the painted texture as a gradient threshold. Two, water surface ripple is made using a noise texture on the generator texture coordinate. A color ramp is used to add a threshold to how much ripple will appear. Three, for the water edge ripple, using the object coordinate set the gradient node to spherical. Mix that with a magic texture, then a pair of color ramps to help with the masking. Black color will turn alpha transparent with the help of a transparent shader. This can also be done using add blending. Four, point ripple is controlled by an empty. Texture coordinates set to object with the empty as the object. Three textures are required. First, a gradient texture set to spherical. Second, a wave texture set to ring. And third, a noise texture set to 4D. Use a wave texture mixed with a noise texture to create the distorted ripple. The gradient will get a threshold from the color ramp. Mix these results to create a point ripple. Then mix the result with the rest. The point ripple is great for a fishing rod ripple. Then we can animate all of these. We also hid something special on the same topic in the show notes, so be sure to check that out too. The second tutorial is Making Vector Illustrations in 3D by Louis Dumont. You'll need an SVG file to get this one working. First, import the SVG file into Blender. The SVG will be converted into curve objects. Then there are two methods to make your model into pseudo 3D. The first method is using curve geometry parameters. You can extrude and bevel your curve object, then arrange their Y positions. The second method is to convert the curve to mesh. Use the solidify modifier to add thickness. And any other modifiers to enhance the look. Then arrange each object's Y position. If you want that extra shading to your vector art, this is one way to go. Please give it a try. The third tutorial is Normal Shading Study by Epic Night Studios. This topic is our favorite. The edge flow will help with getting the shading perfect. Bunch the edges into a vertex group. That will make it easy to see which vertex group normal should be pointing into which direction. Add a bit of vertex normal editing and your shading will look perfect. Give it a test in Blender 2.90. You'll be surprised how nice your shading will flow. These bonus tutorials will be worth your time. First is how to create Ghibli trees in 3D by Lightning Voice Studio. This one is hot right now and will be the basis of our discussion later. Second, Grease Pencil Head Turn Animation by The Adventures of Lollipop Man. 2D animation isn't hard and Grease Pencil makes it even easier. Third, Tune Water Shader by Southern Shoddy. Not enough water ripple while this one adds depth. Fourth, Shader to RGB Article by Kia Valdez Betcher. This article is exploring the shader to RGB node. It's a fun read. And fifth, Anime Stylized Grass by Kristoff Dedeen. Kristoff solved the previous particle limitations and showcases a nice grassland. Apparently, the BNPR community is huge. We're here on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and Discord. You can also find show notes for this and previous shows on blendernpr.org, which you may actually find useful because we always hide cool goodies in them. Blender Extended Expressive Renderer, or BEER, has the back end, which is called Malt, fully funded. This means that the fundraising forward will be for the front end, the BEER UI. At the time of this writing, we have over 13,000 US dollars. So thank you to everyone who's donated and a massive shout out to the person who donated $1,000. Yes, that's right. You know who you are and we love you. The fundraising batch moving forward will have a longer interval. Previously, we targeted for a batch of blend files every two weeks. Now we're regulating that to around every three weeks or so. We still want to keep the quality high for everyone. The fifth batch will have a blend file running fully on BEER's back end malt. So please stay tuned for that. And now for the grand topic of this show. Getting to produce NPR artwork in the style of Ghibli movies has been a goal for many NPR artists. If you're watching this at some point in your NPR journey, you must have dreamt of making a Ghibli-like scene. The journey to Ghibli is not straightforward. It took Guilty Gear excerpt from Arc System Works to message everyone about the importance of shadow shapes, vertex normal editing, proper threshold, and high quality line art. As a result from that, BNPR and the community funded the creation of the abnormal add-on. The add-on eases the editing of vertex normals to enhance shading quality, and now we use abnormal daily. There are a few main elements to create Ghibli-like artwork. The first is the grassland. Previously, we could not get this right because we're unable to map the color of the grass from the emitter plane. Christophe de Dain solved that in the last show and enhanced that with a bonus tutorial in this show. No matter the length of the grass or how many flowers the grassland has, we can do that inside of Blender with ease. The second piece of this puzzle is the water. Many people have gone and solved this. In the second batch of Beer Fundraising, Alex Mailer created water splashes, waves, and ripples using grease pencil and mesh. And there are countless others who have solved this using pure shading. In this show, we have Mauricio Heberli and Southern Shoddy doing that. The third part is foliage. Foliage can be done in 2D as a texture or in 3D. In 3D, foliage can be a blob of flat plane textures and the normal edited, or a particle system with the vertex normal data transferred as shown by Lightning Boy Studio. Pushes are solved as well. These are not the only ways we can solve the foliage problem though. We can foresee easier methods with vector displacement used in the future. The side effect of being able to create foliage in 3D is clouds. Clouds are the fourth part of the puzzle, and so we can get these majestic towering cumulus clouds. They're easier to make in 3D than to paint them as textures. The fifth part of the puzzle is the ability to control colors. In Eevee, this is done using shader to RGB node. In this show, we have included a discussion article about this crucial node. In the future, beer will be handling all of these. The sixth part is special effects. In show number five, we have Cody Winch with his one mesh tornado. In show number three, we have Master Xeon 1001 with a fire tutorial, which has the same setup as in many games. And the community has been working to make more of these effects. We are also quite pampered with a huge amount of grease pencil tutorials. The most notable is by deduce, as he introduces grease pencil to the largest number of people. Wu Yiming also turned L.A.M.P.R. into a grease pencil modifier. He's still working on it even today. So grease pencil is the seventh part. So, to sum it all up, character 2D and 3D, check, grass and ground, check, trees and mountains, check, water, sea, waves and ponds, check, sky and clouds, check and finally, special effects, check. We have all the ingredients to make a Ghibli scene. In the BNPR community, everything is built and improved upon by many dedicated stylized artists and developers. The winding and difficult path has been made straight for you. So what are you waiting for? The path is yours to walk. Unleash the Ghibli scene and animations in you. Now it's time to get hyped and overdrive your inspiration meter. Here comes the artworks of the month. These scenes by Kendrick C. They're gorgeous and speak of a certain design language. Let's focus on just this scene. Everything lacks details, but that is by design. It has shape consistency though. Fully edge, cloud, ground and everything looks simple. But the composition is hardcore. Less modeling and more arranging. We like it. This one comes from the Dylan Gu team for the animation. Infinite 100%, My Hero Academia Cats. In this second part, Meowdy Area and Erie Nyan find themselves fighting against a giant transformed cheap sake. Epic battles and no more spoilers. Go experience for yourself. Once again, this show is brought to you by these awesome people. Please thank them kindly. And don't forget to visit the show notes. We have a lot of resources for your Ghibli journey. Before we go, one last question. What is your dream Ghibli scene?