 This show is brought to you by these happy patrons. Hey, it's the BNPR show! Number 11. A Celebration of Stylized Rendering Today's highlights? First, hidden dimensions with grease pencil. Second, turned photos into stylized paintings. And third, the BNPR animation jam. Let's start with the news. This video by Mysom Hosaini made quite a round on Twitter and YouTube. The secret to the hidden parts, grease pencil masking. It's done by setting the 2D order, aka layer ordering, from the bottom to the top. Then using a mask at the bottom layer to show only grease pencil drawings behind the mask. This technique was hinted in the last show. What we said a few shows ago is that something like this would happen. Way earlier than the predicted April Fool's Day. So we're kind of proud to put this idea in so many heads. This isn't exactly new news, but relevant for this show later in the community segment. Yadub made 3 simple human rigs for grease pencil sketching. The idea is to use these rigs to aid in getting proportions right, when drawing with grease pencil. The rigs are available as pay as much as you want on Gumroad. You can also make simple rigs, but his rigs are very well done. So go check them out when you're in an animation jam. Eric Selen wrote this long and comprehensive guide on how to use freestyle, as in the great renderer of line art, not necessarily wrapping. It covers these topics. First, how does freestyle rendering work? Second, how to set up freestyle? Third, freestyle line sets? Fourth, freestyle line styles? Fifth, is freestyle compositing in EV and cycles? And sixth and last, exporting freestyle lines as SVG? The article covers a huge chunk of how to grok and work with freestyle. We also have an in-depth freestyle course, Freestyle Level Up. Some of the layering info is definitely outdated, so if you read Eric's guide, it will cover you on the outdated parts if you decide to pick up the course for Christmas. Tutorial Time This video tip is an interesting one by the Wizards Apprentice. You only need one photo to make an NBR painting, and this can be done with almost any node system. The idea is simple. Use a few gray color textures as displacement maps. These displacement maps will displace the original image, and if you have a broad flat brush bump texture, you will displace the mesh like it's painted using a broad flat brush. You have to follow a bit of natural painting methods while making these displacement maps, or the resulting image will be extremely hard to comprehend, but how you mix the displacement textures will be to your liking. We're eager to see what you can come up with this easy tip, turning any photo into an NBR painting. This tutorial by Polygon Runway is a simple technique to a more 3D tune material. This method will require you to use more lamps than normal. The charm of this method is that you get interesting hues at different color values from the lamps. The ingredients to this tune material are the following. The first, you need a tune shader with a solid gradient transition. The second, you need any diffuse shader. And third, you need a few colorful lamps. Fourth, probably some unicorn tears and a can-do attitude. To combine the tune shader with the diffuse shader, you need a mix shader. Mixing these shaders without adding interesting lamps on factor on the mix shader node will not be interesting. Adding another color ramp to the factor will enhance the result. The hues from the lamps will appear more on the diffuse part and give a soft gradient. By not only working on the nodes, the result will be very interesting. By the way, did you notice that many shaders in the 2004 Apple Seed anime have this similar look? With more control and art direction, this material setup can surpass the look in the anime. Hmm, maybe we're up to something here. Be sure to watch this tutorial after the show. The link is in the show notes. We will cover this topic more in depth in the next show also. Here's a quick tip by Mortmort that you might have missed. How do you animate the UV to get this color transition effect? We used to have an animate all add-in to insert UV keys. The add-on is no longer available in Blender 2.8. We can do it the traditional way by animating UV offset on the mapping node. You can animate waterfall textures, fire textures, or even falling text like in The Matrix using the same method. Like we said before, and we are here to say it again, master mapping node, that node creates magic. Here are a few more tutorials. We just can't fit them into the show, but they will be worth your time. The first is a texture painting tutorial by Grant Abbott. You will learn a few more texture painting techniques while painting a crystal. The second is a freestyle sketchy lines tutorial by Kiskit3D. Once you start to get this, you can go wild with the line style, just like the demo video we did a while ago. Third is how to copy a normal on a split mesh tip by Active Motion Pictures. This isn't used very often, but it's good to know that this feature is here. We wish that this could be faster instead of copy pasting vertex normals one after the other. The jam senpais of the BNPR Discord decided to start an animation jam, which ends up with the name Blender NPR Animation Jam. Yep, a very long name. Maybe we can call it something like BNPR Anti-Jam? The goal of the animation jam is to challenge and polish the whole animation workflow. You storyboard quickly, model quickly, texture the model quickly, shade it quickly, frig the model quickly, and animate the story, well, quickly. No matter what, this is the real deal. It's the same tasks you'll be doing when you're working in an animation or a game studio. Each week, or how long the jam period might be, you will vote for a topic. The topic will be the most voted and will be the theme of the animation jam. You can work solo or in a team. Do all the tasks required to make an animation in the theme. When you're done, post the animation on YouTube and put a link to it on the jam submission channel in Discord. Want to be as good as Dylan Gu or Agu-Rex? This is your chance to shine. You will learn a lot from it. And we almost forgot, the current jam theme is train. Feel free to interpret the theme. The workflow simply must involve Blender. You can find the link to our Discord in the show notes. Now go, go, go! We asked the community to explain what is NPR to somebody who only thought that NPR is tune shaders and freestyle and cartoon. This is what they said. Chris Lee wrote, Any technique used to create a stylized, illustrative or artistic render style from a 3D environment instead of any kind of realism. Tushkin Volcarona wrote, NPR can be anything that isn't striving for voter realism, except good NPR is driven in a certain stylistic direction by intention. Amaya Chiro wrote, Here's how I'm gonna say it. You know how most of the time 3D animation got like really real? NPR is just the other way. Terry Hancock wrote, It's intentional focus on a presentation style departing from the limited range of simulating photography. At Zapp for that wrote, Honestly, maybe just say stylized rendering instead of non-photorealistic rendering. We like this idea a lot. In 2012, we started BNPR. We toyed with the same idea to put stylized in the name. But blender stylized in short is, well, BS. And we don't like being called BS. So the more complete blender NPR and BNPR names stuck to today. And one more. Rafael Sanchez wrote, Art freedom. Heck yeah, that's a good one Rafael. Want to get a much deeper and nuanced answer? Please get us 200 active patrons. Then we can make the deep dive exploration of NPR. When people ask, what is NPR? You can just point to that future video. We like this idea a lot. It's that time again for you to hold your jaws because the awesome sauce is coming. This isometric view map like render has a lot going on it. The title of the render is secret forest hideout covered by a fallen tree by at Terzalo. Let's break down this render. Ambient occlusion is used as a hatching factor. The AO pass is inverted to make the shaded area bright for the texture to appear. Next is the freestyle setup. There are three line sets visible. The tree trunk set with the line style thickness along stroke modifier or thickness distance from object modifier. Both modifiers can achieve the same result. The second line set is on the conifers. The line style has either the geometry purlin noise modifier, sinus displacement modifier, or the spatial noise modifier on it. The third line set is on the ground and everything else in the scene. The line style has a much thicker line and we guess there is a geometry bezier curve modifier since the lines are smoother. Breaking down any render this way requires one to have a strong blender foundation. Meaning you have to know how each feature works and how they are combined. Anyways, this is a great render to do that. DDoos made this nostalgic animation called Starfield Rider. Can you guess what is 2D and what is 3D? The spokes on the bicycle are 2D. The shading on the front basket and the glow on the octopus are 2D. The character is made of 2D planes. The best part is how the grease pencil interacts with the handle art. A really well done animation. Lion X Animation has released Chapter 3 of Paper Thin, Chaos. It is short and we won't spoil it here, so go watch it. This animation galore by At Oldspear is Penny Parker fighting mysterious bots. There's a lot of NPR working in here and we love it a lot. You really need to watch this one multiple times. Oh wait, what? It's the end of the show. But please don't go yet. We have something to announce. Please subscribe if you have not and you can find us in these places. And now the announcement. The 12th show will be at the end of January and early February of next year, so that we can have plenty of time to rest and have fun for the festive season. By the way, the show is very underfunded and it takes a lot of time and research to make. So please go to the Patreon page and be a patron. These are the current patrons and awesome people funding the creation of this show. Thank you. You guys are keeping the show running for everyone. Before we go, two last questions. First, did you know there is a discount for our color ebook for Christmas every year? Second, what excites you about Blender 2.81?