 Hey, it's the BNPR show number six a celebration of stylized rendering The highlights still water fluffy clouds and glamorous curves To start let's get wet with a fun tutorial by Chris Cureford at blender artists forum The tutorial is in text images and video snippets But it is well written such that not understanding it at a glance is an impossibility The basic idea is simple make thick borders on a Verona textures dark edges That means we have a color ramp in there somewhere FYI Verona textures can do a lot of effects and we'll see more of it in action in the next tutorial as well You can do two layers of this same texture on a single mesh or separately on their own mesh For one layer you may want to add a screen space reflection With two meshes you might want to change the alpha settings for your materials You can also add a small displacement and you can do even more With masking you can mimic the waves behind a boat and a sea plane in porco rosso With a few tweaks you can extend the shader to cover many water-like effects If you like Chris Cureford's tutorial style, you might also like his aura tutorial It's pretty cool as well Links to both of these tutorials are in the show notes Go ahead and give them a read look and a listen Let's go up a little bit to make some clouds David McSween shows us how simple it is to make a particle cloud The first step is making the cloud element from a plane. There are two parts One using a spherical gradient to mask the shape of the cloud and two of Verona texture as the cloud texture Then make the cloud element pointing to the camera using a track to constraint When that is done, we animate the Verona texture using a driver The driver consists of three inputs number one the x-location of the cloud element to the x-location of the camera and Number three the frame number Using this expression the cloud will be alive when you press play The next setup is the particle system itself First you make the particle spawn all at once Second the particles are arranged in a grid inside of the emitter Third make the cloud plane the particles and then fourth turn off gravity influence Currently in EV the particle system will still not hide the emitter So if you do encounter that error, it's Blender's fault. We're sure that this will get fixed very soon however On our website, we do have a download to a particle system for raindrops ripples and splashes With that the water cycle is complete Now here are two tutorials from at sushi tamaki on YouTube The tutorial is voiced in Japanese with English subtitles. Just think of it like watching an anime That is of course unless you speak Japanese and it's like watching normal TV. I guess Anyway, it's all about modeling in the first tutorial using a game character modeling technique So as always get and set up a good reference This can be your own character design sheet or something you find pretty much anywhere online Always 3d model with the lowest poly count possible Since the head is the most viewed part of the character most of the time modeling is spent here For modeling hair keep the poly count very low to make the mesh easy to handle By very low we mean less than 200 faces To make it easy to spot errors early on Basic materials must be available while modeling use pre-made models for the body to save time These models can be different body types with different body parts and With that Anatomy knowledge is very important for character modeling More advanced techniques are shown in the second tutorial There are a few UV mapping techniques specifically geared towards NPR To get the outer lines, which is the freestyle line type equivalent of silhouette inverted hole method is used Vertex groups are added with weight to tweak the outline thickness for the inner lines UV unwrapping skill is definitely needed Try to align where the line is based on a ready-made texture Fortune shading two textures are used The first texture is the colors in the lit area another texture is the color for the shadow areas We use a diffuse shader to blend the two textures Of course, there are many more details in the tutorials. So make sure you watch them NPR game Ah Team Fortress 2 is a game that is born from a quake mod that has that special shading charm in this show We'll look at how the character is shaded There are two major groups of shaders in TF 2 The view dependent lighting components and the view independent lighting components The view dependent lighting components are the rim light and the fog specular reflection The view independent lighting components are Albedo the unshaded texture and a Warped diffuse from a half Lambert shader with a color ramp And thirdly an ambient cube which is a dynamic matcap like texture So with all these parts, how do we mix them? In general to brighten something we add to them to darken or to shade we often multiply them Here's how the team at Valve did it and this is the final algorithm for the TF 2's character shading For a more in-depth exploration of how to mix these NPR components You should check out the wildly popular pixel math ebook This ebook has widened many minds to the endless NPR possibilities It is a must read The Garden of Forking Paths is an animation by Juan Camardea and his team The story is an adaptation of a police story by the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges And if I murdered any of those names, I apologize humbly in advance In this trailer a ton of NPR tricks combining evie and grease pencil can be seen When done the animation link is approximated to be 15 minutes with over 200 shots The tools used are Inkscape, Gimp, Krita, Blender, Audacity and LMMS Pretty much the whole open source suite We certainly look forward to featuring the final product next year And we have a long list of cool artworks this month Let's augule a bit animation shader is something we don't see in photoreal artworks But in this stylized animated turntable by at BRTJKZL An animated shader added more than just one more dimension to the animation It makes the animation much more alive. You have to experience making one to fully understand the impact It's very expressive and so alive Wen Tong Yu on facebook adds a fix for the fake light with an empty object We've shown in a previous show With this fix the fake light now works in evie We can finally do light groups in evie and cycles which is a feature much needed in NPR. Go check out his post Kranz made a dithering shader in his video. He mentioned the broad idea of how it works The setup is quite heavy with a mind-numbing number of nodes and node groups It is much simpler when done in code So go watch his video and download the node setup If you are new here welcome and please subscribe And please tell your friends about the show as well To those who do click the show notes. We have many hidden goodies in there Also, go to these links to get even more NPR greatness If you'd like to see the stylized documentary be one of those cool patrons of the show on patreon We need at least 200 of you to make that happen There are still a few more discount codes for the soul-stirring digital color mastery ebook and video bundle Go click the show notes for that link Oh, yeah, and the show title. There is a special link in this video description explaining it So go check that out as well But before we go one last question How will the light groups feature enhance your stylized artworks?