 This show is brought to you by These Happy Patrons. Hey there you beautiful people! Welcome to the BNPR show, the show where we feature the happenings in stylized rendering. Today's highlights are, first the outline node rendering in Cycles and EV. Second, let's go retro with sprites. And third, an abnormal update for the abnormal add-on. Time for the news. Chalk Style is a free add-on to render stylized wireframe images by Chip Walters. When you click its render button, not F12, this add-on renders three images. An ambient occlusion image at the full resolution. An outline image and a wireframe image at twice the resolution. There are extra steps to composite these images. We're sure that you'll figure out how to composite them. The download link to this add-on is in the show notes. In other outline-related news, Miguel Pozo created a patch to add an outline node for the material node graphs working on both Cycles and EV. This is pretty much like edge nodes, but it can be seen in real-time. You can download the patch Blender build with the material node, with a few example files via Gumroad. There is an extensive documentation of the node, and much detail compared to the usual Blender documentation. At this moment, it is still a work in progress, with plans to add many features and fix a few common workflow gotchas. So go give the patch some love and tell them we sent you there. Nice work, guys! If you have not used the abnormal add-on, you are missing the most wanted add-on for NPR and Blender. Cody has been fixing and updating the add-on from bug reports and enhancement proposals. Here are the changes since the release last month. 1. An option to use vertex groups to filter changes on normals. 2. Added persistent add-on preferences so you can see that in the add-in activation screen. 3. Limited the 2D UI to only draw in the 3D view it has started in. This makes for a better multi-view support. 4. Support for custom navigation key maps, meaning you can navigate vertex normal mode using your own navigation key maps. 5. More selection options. Select linked and invert selection. 6. Option to toggle between smooth and flat shading. 7. Better error handling, so the Python console isn't flooded with draw errors after a crash. And best of all, number 8, present tab to leave vertex editing mode will confirm the changes. Go download abnormal right now to fix your problematic shading. Time for tutorials and tricks. First up is the fourth part in a Tune Shader tutorial series by Lightning Boys Studio. This tutorial drills deep into the topic of anisotropic hair and how to create controls for different styles. Anisotropic is the specular reflection which stretches along the tangent of the surface, which is similar to how hair reflects light. To control the tangent direction, we have to UV unwrap the hair mesh. Here are the parts required to make the hair highlight. First is mask in the U direction, which is the X direction of the UV. Second part is the vector transfer which reacts to light much like specular. To do that, we need a vector transfer from world to camera vector. Third part is noise texture using the X value to make these stripes point in the vertical direction. The fourth part is a duplicate of the third setup, but now the noise is much smaller in detail. Fifth part is also a duplicate of the third, but a much larger noise texture, a mask for everything. The sixth part is a color ramp to remap the gray colors to get a sharp tune like shading. Seventh is mask using a specular shader to mask over everything so that it can track the location where the light is shining. Eighth is another color ramp to make the hidden specular appear more towards the sides of the hair. Ninth is a mix RGB to color the specular highlights. With all these ingredients combined, we get, not Captain Planet, but we can have as much detail as we want. This certainly isn't the only way to make an anisotropic hair shader. You can add, remove, and enhance the setup, and optimize it for your use cases. For sure the video is giving us a lot of options to play with, but one thing will remain constant in all anisotropic hair setups, you must UV unwrap the hair mesh. With that, please have fun with this tutorial. The second tutorial is a tip by Dante on how to extract colors to make the color palette in Blender. These features will only be available in the upcoming Blender 2.83 and onward. Note, before you do any NPR color-related task, please go to the render tab in the properties window, the color management panel, and change the view transform from filmic to standard. This will make sure the selected color will display the same on the 3D view. First, you need an image with colors on it. Second, load the image in an image viewer window. Third, go to the image menu and click extract palette. The extracted colors will be in the color settings for your tools. And that's it. It's a quick and very useful color tip. If you want to color pick awesome colors like a pro, and not worry too much about pre-made color palettes, you can get our soul-stirring digital color mastery ebook. After finishing the ebook, you can make your own unique color palettes on the fly. With a strong color foundation, it will be very hard to pick ugly color combinations. And now for your dose of a retro fix. Southern Shoddy made a tutorial for simple pixel art in Eevee. First, you need a simpler character design with no fine details. Fine details will not be visible in a low resolution render and can become noise in your final render. Second, coat the character with a simple tune shader. Third, point the camera to the style of output you want. In general, there are three camera styles. First, the side view. Second, the top down view. And third, the isometric view. But in some games, they just put a side view character on an isometric view background. The next step is making the render size tiny. The resolution of 64 pixels squared often works. To remove anti-aliasing in the film panel, turn the filter size to 0.1. Now you can render your pixel art. But then how do we turn these images into a spreadsheet or something called a texture atlas for use in games? Good news, Markham3D has you covered on that. In his tutorials, he shows the manual way to do it. For a small project, the manual way is the way to go. But if you have hundreds of images, you may want an add-in and they do cost a little fee. Let's look at the manual method. After you've rendered a sequence of images, start a new blend file to assemble the spreadsheet. First, the camera setup. Reset and position the camera to the orthographic view. Second, add a simple image texture to a plane. Load your first pixel art image to the shader. Third, set the alpha from the image in the diffuse BSDF and in the material setting. Set the blend mode to alpha, hashed. Fourth, add two array modifiers, one for the x direction and another for the y direction. Fifth, change the rendering size of the camera to fit the image arrays. Move the camera into position and also change the orthographic scale to fit everything. Six, apply the array modifiers. Seventh, enter edit mode and separate the mesh by loose parts. Each sprite its own mesh. Eighth, now for repeating tasks. Set the material on each sprite and change the image on it. Do this until you exhaust all your sprites. If you have extra sprites, remove them. After pressing F12, save the final texture. Ta-da! You just made a sprite sheet! Here are a few more tutorials and trick videos that will be worth your time. Blender Grease Pencil 2.8 tutorial for beginners. Part 1 and 2 by DDoos. A must watch for those wanting to add 2D design into 3D space. Blender Grease Pencil 2D 3D Hybrid Storyboard Animatic by Spitfire Storyboards. This one dives deep into another application of Grease Pencil, a lengthy video with a lot of details. Understanding Curve plus Simple Deform Modifiers for Mesh Hair by Aversion of Reality. This is an extra tutorial to explain the transforms from the Flat Hair Mesh Modifier setup we saw in the previous show. It goes deeper into how to correct your Flat Hair Modeling setup. It's a must watch for you to understand object modifiers even if you don't use the setup. Ascii Art by CGmatter and Yogyag. This is not one but two overview videos on how to make Ascii Art using Blender. They pretty much use the same texture setup as Paul Kakegi, half tone setup but appending the different character texture on a different color value. Heart Rate is a music video by Basin Channel. The abstract feeling you get from watching the MV is something else. So go watch it for the NPR-ness. Dylan Gu Ke, a supporter of the show and team. Wait, we also saw Rookie Curry in there. They made this latest epic battle titled, My Hero Academia Cats. The Meal Lion, The Hero. Too much awesomeness and you just have to watch the animation. Whose artwork got into the artwork of the month this time? Let's find out. That 70s house is a 3D scene by Andy Begg. What can we learn here? First, the trees and the bushes have inverted faces. The gradient for the sun and the sky are flipped in value. A blue tarmac, something you don't see every day. And the car's color value is perfect compared to its surroundings. We see soft edge shadows. A small value change in the lit color compared to it in the shadow. And glass windows on the house and the car are simple yet stylized. And last, the brick chimney has just the right amount of details. Perfect. Nice job Andy Begg. This is not exactly the end of the show yet, so please stick around for a bit. We have a bit more NPR goodness that we can fit into the show, so check the show notes for that. Please subscribe if you have not. You can find us in these places as well. These are the awesome people funding the creation of this show. Thank you for keeping the show running for everyone. Before we go, one last question. What pixel art game do you love? With that, this is the end of the show, and please stay safe.