 This show is brought to you by these happy patrons Hey there you beautiful people in lockdown Welcome to the BNPR show We have a special show for you this time. In this show We will discuss how to start up your NPR journey on very little money and effort Then we will see the jaw-dropping things the stylized community has been doing in the past month Around various places on the internet 3d CG is advertised as follows high quality GI High poly count Z brush meshes movie quality VFX with dust smoke and explosions Well, these are all made on expensive power-gulping computers often taking a team of seasoned artists to produce They cost a lot and take a long time to make So for us NPR enthusiasts 3d CG starts much simpler and with a much lower hardware requirement Even a potato PC can make great NPR artworks There is a saying in the NPR community it goes something like this the style follows the intention There are two parts here first the style. This is the final result and may not be what is behind the scene Second the intention. This is the driving force to produce the style and both of them come together from different sources But we'll just stop at that and leave the discussion for a later date The goal this time is how to start the NPR journey on very little budget and still producing great artworks games and movies So let's start with hardware requirements If you go to this page on blender org You'll see that blender only requires a 64-bit dual core 2 gigahertz CPU with SSE to support 4 gigabytes of RAM 1280 by 768 pixel display and a graphics card with 1 gigabyte of RAM with open GL 3.3 support This is pretty much any refurbished computer out there at this time, but you may want to upgrade these things Increase the RAM to at least 8 gigabytes and try to get DDR4 RAM It should be faster, but it depends on if the hardware can accept the faster RAM Try a full HD display 1920 by 1080 so that you don't have to struggle with blender's UI Find a graphics card with at least 2 gigabytes of VRAM and with support for open GL 3.3 Usually these things are very inexpensive Upgrade the storage to a solid state drive. This will make your PC more responsive in general Get a good keyboard with a number pad and a good mouse If your current PC has these specs, you're good to go for NPR Now that you have a PC and Linda running. What do you do? Since you have a small VRAM you should avoid a couple of things The first thing is to avoid modeling with high polygon count High polygon count is relative, but for your hardware keep all your models below 2,000 faces each If your GPU can only draw 2 million faces With 2,000 face objects You can have a thousand of those objects in a scene before you hit the hardware limit and a thousand objects are a lot Further side note on that do not use subdivision surface modifiers or dynamic topology on your mesh Those can exponentially increase the polygon count without you knowing The second thing to avoid is high resolution textures Any texture that is over 2048 pixels squared are considered high resolution They will eat up your VRAM very fast for gradient textures. Do not go too low res either though Keep it at least 256 pixels squared for the ultra elite folks The best texture is no texture It forces them to model the mesh very carefully to get the best apology and then apply the vertex color as the texture Going low-poly doesn't mean every character is a voxel Minecraft character That is kind of for the super beginners and I think most of us can do much better There is a fun Twitter tag lately that fits starting NPR on a budget hashtag 256 FES This modeling challenge was initiated by at feel Zen VR with no deadline The challenge is to model anything with the budget of 256 faces or triangles If you want to limit yourself further try using only 256 pixel squared textures also and The results they're quite beautiful Many model types in various styles in different mesh topologies with interesting colors Now feast your eyes at these low-poly count artworks by participating in the 256 FES challenge You'll learn these things Master the modeling tools optimizing models for various shapes Learn how to UV unwrap making low res textures playing with simple NPR shaders rigging Optimizing the mesh for animation weight painting and You'll come up with cool designs Best of all you get to finish your models very quickly quick results mean higher motivation And here's a surprise Since you made the models low-poly you can use them in games on any platform If you're dreaming of making an RPG you're ready if you want to make an RTS the poly count will not kill your PC and Since you made these models stylized what you do with them will have a unique identity You can also turn them into pixel art You can of course refer to show number 15 on how to do that Another example is the latest video from Dillion Goos YouTube channel In this example the animation was animated by Shane new bill If you made a good enough character rig even with the lowest quality graphics you can still make an epic animation So what we're saying here is poly count global illumination High resolution textures are not what make your artworks epic What makes your artwork epic is the coherent style a good story and a few well executed technical plans So now go out there and show what you can do with limited hardware We'd love to see how you progress and grow Speaking of cool artworks. How about we explore the cool artworks from the community This character render suzuhana by at mukumi looks like a 2d render when static like this Then it turns So what makes it feel 2d? First the character design is full of 2d designs Second the texture is painted to have a detailed density fitting for the screen space viewing Third it has a limited palette with a crushed down value range and limited saturation Combine these and you have a perfect 3d model, which looks like a 2d render nice job demo 2 concept video by rayark ink This is a concept trailer for demo 2 the game The short plot is alone in the castle a figure plays on the piano demo one day a girl falls from the sky A castle littered with mysterious inhabitants a sacred tree growing by the melody of the piano A girl with no memory and demo A gentle story that will touch your heart This animation is a mixture of 2d in 3d When the camera circles the character that reveals the character is actually 3d With a paint over on the line are and some of the surfaces Plus the color grading makes the animation looks superb There will be a demo movie soon as well The famous studio production ig is involved So be eager to watch the final movie and be prepared to cry Hooray is made by a team formed about three years ago They consist of at pop rec at ohaji kiko And at Haruno underscore 168 With the music production by at 666 underscore Illumi The storyboard is done with grease pencil in blender Grease pencil is also used to add 2d quality expressions The result is insanely great But not all the expressions are done using grease pencil For efficiency some mouth shapes for doing some angles are a 3d mesh The mixture of 3d and 2d makes this animation feel authentic Good job otherworldly system is the latest creation by gensho yasuda The main character was transported into another world and met a few interesting characters For the rest of the plot please watch the full trailer animation For a one man animation and blender this is a great work You may know by now that if you stick to the end of the show You get to see the question of the month And you might be able to answer it so please stay around for a bit Please subscribe if you have not and you can find us in these places as well We have even more npr goodness than we can fit into the show The tutorials missing in the show are in the show notes so check out the notes for that These are the awesome people keeping the show running for everyone Please thank them kindly and before we go the one last question What old low poly games do you love? And that's a wrap. Please stay safe everyone