 Hey, it's the BNPR show, number 3, a celebration of stylized rendering. On today's show, Colonel Convolution in Sable, Tutorial Miming, and LANPR's Future Plans. Let's start this show on a serious note. In this made-a-tutorial by Marius Oberholster on YouTube, he discussed the seriousness of copying a tutorial 100%. As one wise man once said, tutorial miming is a plague as old as time. Imitation alone will not get you very far. The deeper truth of imitation is to understand why you are copying and how it will benefit you later. The solution is to knowledge transfer a tutorial to where you need the techniques. Transferring need not be super precise. Why you are getting the result from what you did is much more important. This is similar to the lengthy opening chapter we wrote in the Soul-stirring Digital Color Mastery e-book. So go watch this meta-tutorial. It will make you a better artist. We cannot have enough introduction videos to vertex normal editing. Vertex normal editing seems to be the black magic for stylized rendering. Vertex normal is on the vertices, whereas normal mapping is a texture. Normal maps are not as powerful as vertex normals. A normal map is dependent on how we UV unwrap the texture and the resolution of the texture. Vertex normals, however, are 3D vectors in 3D space and thus have more accurate control to our shading. But the truth. It's so simple that most artists don't even know how to use it. The problem? Uh, maybe tutorial miming? Mr. Tri-Pie gives us another perspective on how to edit vertex normals. Another perspective is really great if we still do not fully understand how it works even after watching other tutorials. Then there is the issue of UX for vertex normal editing tools as discussed in the first show. Regardless, let's imagine that we have the most perfect tool layout and get some vertex normal editing into all our stylized models. Go watch this video and bend light to your will. Now here's a tutorial you can trust. Master Zeon 1001 on YouTube shares how to make procedural fire based on ErisDraw 3D's nodecraft. And yes, nodecraft is a thing now. Did you see my air quotes? The idea of this setup is simple. The first part is making a procedural texture that will be used as a factor. The second part is making another procedural texture that's very wavy, well, like fire. The first texture will mask the second texture, producing a fire effect. The other part to pay attention to is what texture coordinate is being used. The first procedural texture coordinate comes from the UV coordinates, while the second procedural texture coordinate comes from the generated coordinate. The rest of the nodes are just fine-tuning the fire shape and coloring. Also, get familiar with the mapping node. If you never know, that node might surprise you. If you're trying to learn material nodecraft in general, this is a really good tutorial to start with. Go watch it, it's pretty cool. Sable is an open world exploration game set in a desert environment. Sable leaves her family for the first time and is now on a journey to discover the world. The developers, Greg and Daniel, both love stylized artworks. They have been scouting for good looking styles that they know how to make. In the short interview we had with them, Sable runs in Unity 3D. Models are easy and fast to get into the game. This comes with the disadvantage of not being able to preview the style reliability in the modeling software. One of the techniques used in the Sable's edge detection, among many, is the Robert Cross operator. Robert Cross operator is a kernel convolution to detect the rate of change mostly in a 45 degree direction. Robert Cross is a filter similar to Gaussian, Blur, Sable, and Pruitt. You can find those in the compositing editor nodes under the, well, big surprise, filter section. Here's the simplified explanation of how it's done. Imagine this grid of numbers representing the pixels of an image. You use another small matrix called a kernel of any size, 2x2 or 3x3 or whatever size, to get a new pixel value. We take the kernel and put it on top of the image. We calculate the multiplication sums of each cell and store these numbers as another image. This operation is called a matrix convolution. The Robert Cross operator is a more primitive edge detection compared to the Sable operator. It's extremely fast, but even faster if you hack the algorithm a bit to remove the square root part. Since the kernel convolution matrix is small, a 2x2 matrix, compared to a 3x3 matrix on the Sable operator, there will be a lot more noise. So to remove the noise, a more clever threshold is needed. If you simply use a greater than operation, some of the important lines will be removed. To avoid that problem and remove the noise, line continuity of edges is taken into consideration using something like the canny operator. The canny operator is another kernel convolution done on top of the first operation. To get a better grasp of how filters work, please watch the computer file and deeplearning.ai video lectures on YouTube. We also included some related links in the show notes. And if you like filters, you'll also love the Pixel Math ebook. Get the ebook if you have not. Because math is actually really fun. Anyways, for Sable, this noise is not a very big problem. Sable has solid colors, so mathematically speaking, the transition between the shades is very clear. And the result is very pleasing to behold. Sable is a huge Mobius painting coming to life. The style dictates the math, and the math directs the style. It's a ying ying yang full circle, which we don't get to see happen every day. And we will certainly be getting this game when it comes out in the future. The Meteor and the Moon was created by Sarah Feldlaufer and Bjorn Leonard, based on a song written and recorded by Chris Tevener. It is based on a short story by a young student at the Great Ormond Street Hospital. You have to watch it, it's really adorable, and it makes you feel all warm and fluffy inside. I Lost My Body is an upcoming French animation film directed by Jeremy Clappin and produced by Marc Dupundavis, with the main target audience of teenagers and adults. The story has a grim tagline. A severed hand has a life of its own and tries to reunite with the body from which it was detached. A combination of Blender 2.7's grease pencil, freestyle, and various NPR workflows were used in the animation. There was a presentation about the production at Blender Conference 2017. Please don't watch the presentation though, a few of the slides may spoil the story. But we are eager to watch the final result when the movie is released. Before that, please go watch this awesome trailer. It's genuinely good. Time to celebrate the best stylized artworks of the month. This time we have so many of them, so let's get started. We can't get this animation and song out of our heads, it's so simple and well done. We tip our baseball caps to Simon Timeroth. Go watch it after this show, of course the link is in the notes. After that, watch it 10 more times. The song will be stuck in your head for days. Wu Yiming wrote a short article planning the progression of L.A. and NPR for this year. The highlights are L.A. and NPR lines to grease pencil and SBG format, a more intuitive user interface, improved line compositioning options, fixed bugs in triangle clipping algorithms, support non-linear camera perspective, and finally, optimized line shaders and introduced stylized lines. We wish Wu Yiming the best in implementing these plans. You can do it, man. Antonio Vasquez on Twitter, the developer of the new grease pencil in Blender 2.8, tells everyone that we can now display grease pencil material names while in edit mode. To display the names, in the viewport display tab enable the name option. With this, you'll be able to identify the material used on the strokes. This should save you time from toggling grease pencil layers. A much welcomed feature. The show is almost over, meaning you'll be clicking those cool links in the show notes and also clicking on the links to get even more NPR coolness. But please wait. If you'd like to see more of this show, be one of the cool patrons of the show on Patreon. Or of course, you can buy anything from our store. All the links are in the show notes. And are you a game developer? Come feature your games in the show. Before we go, one last question. How does factor work in a mixed blend mode?