 This show is brought to you by these lovely people. Hey there you beautiful NPR enthusiast! Are you ready for some juicy unrealness? Here are the highlights. First, a different way of shading with vectors. Second, departure from night, great animations and dynamics. And third, freestyle has a new user interface. Welcome to the BNPR show! A celebration of stylized and non-photoreal rendering. You know what? Let's get directly into the juicy bits. Here are the artworks of the month. For all you dash-line enthusiast, the dot-dash grease pencil modifier is in master. With this inclusion, stylized dash lines and animating them are super easy to do now. Grease pencil line art chaining, which is the algorithm that makes your lines seamlessly continuous for line art in grease pencil, has gone through many improvements. In this newer update, very few short overlapping segments are left. These short segments can be easily removed with near-field searching. There are other ways to get smooth chaining, like smooth contour support, like in freestyle, for high accurate geometrical calculation. But being very accurate can also introduce chaining problems. A simpler, less accurate algorithm is in the works with a much more clever way to remove unwanted lines. Let's see which algorithm will ultimately create the best results. In other line art related news, the freestyle user interface upgrade, which has gone through over 8 months of development, is now accepted in Blender's master branch. You can find it in the Blender 3.0 alpha test build. Go give it a try and report any bugs you may encounter. There is a new malt feature funded by a version of reality. It's called normal beveling. It is used on anime hair to help smooth out the edges for shading without changing the geometry. It can also be used for edge detection on textures. You can find this new feature in the malt mode in the test bevel branch. Hey, it's tutorial time. Let's start with tune face shading with object normals by a version of reality. What if there was a new discovery for shading that does not involve a mesh? What would that shading process look like? And why do we need to invent something like that? Okay, the basic idea is using an object coordinate from an empty and changing it to the shape of an anime face. The main reason we use object coordinates is to avoid the shading artifacts caused by mesh vectors. Other shading solutions like normal transfer, vertex normal editing, mesh topology tweaks, and baked textures don't always work 100% of the time. They produce shading artifacts which appear in many 3D CG works that emulate the anime style. These artifacts add the CG-ness to the artworks which are not welcomed by many. Using the object coordinates, the shading is always clean no matter the light direction. Regardless of the mesh topology and it works well with animation. The source vector is obtained from an empty object. Then the vector is modified to various shapes used for shading the face. You will need many vector shapes plus some vector math can be quite complex. These shading shapes can be dynamic and static. For the static parts, like neck and back of the head, you can vertex paint those areas to make a mask. For the dynamic parts, like the face, the shading shape of the nose, the triangle shape under the eyes, those will require a more specific vector setup. The more animations on the mesh, the more of these specific vector shapes you will need as well. Some will require a driver to cover the animation. For example, the shading for the opening and closing of the jaw. Other solutions will require copying rotation coordinates for further vector calculation. Every shading shape is a specific case. The amount of nodes to create a certain shape will vary with the complexity of the shape. But combining these shapes are relatively easy since they are like doing Boolean operations. Since this is an experimental shading method, more explanation and discussion will be required to cover the most common use cases. Perhaps a hybrid method would be preferred to lower the complexity to make this technique easily combinable with other shading methods. Oh, and you can also bake the normal result to a texture. But texture stretching in animation, which causes unwanted artifacts, is also an issue you would need to solve. This tutorial is very long and full of a technical discussion, so it's really not for beginners. Please take your time with it. Allow the vectors to flow into you and it will all make sense. And stay tuned for further development. On to grease pencil lettering and animation by Sophie Jantak. Hand lettering, it looks really cool, but it's very tedious and labor intensive to create. Since grease pencil has a build modifier, the bulk of the work is easy. What's left are the techniques to handle quirks when working in grease pencil. So let's handle them one by one. Creating the text. Use any raster software to create your text. The text must be black and the background white. Solving the problem of holes. If you import the text as is, you will encounter the first problem. The holes in the text will turn into a second grease pencil layer with a holdout material. To avoid that, get rid of the holes. First convert the text to raster, then open the holes with gaps. Next, export the text as a JPEG. Import the text image into Blender. Drag the image onto the viewport and it will create an empty. Getting the text. Trace the image to grease pencil, then tweak the settings to get the text as close to the image. Now sculpt your grease pencil text to add more flair. While you're at it, close the gaps you created earlier. Animating the text. Add a build modifier to the text. You will now encounter problem number two. The text is reconstructed out of order. To solve that, go to edit mode. In the order of how they are going to be drawn, move the text one by one to a new grease pencil layer. And the final touches. You can either change the stroke and fill material, or vertex paint them to give the text more glamour. These techniques can also be applied on any grease pencil object, so have fun with it. Area 21. Martin Garrix. Major followers. Official video. Thunder was used extensively to combine 2D and 3D assets. Here's a short write-up from the production team. The production would identify the 3D needs based on the storyboards, which would be divided among the four-person team. The CG artists would then collaborate closely with the director and art director to fully integrate the 3D assets with the 2D animation. And the result? Well, stunningly good. Sinking Feeling is an animation for the Papyrus Prevention of Young Suicide Channel. It was done in Blender. Since it has a music video kind of setup, we can only show screenshots. It is full of emotions, so go give it a watch. Berry Best Friend, Episode 1 by TTDAnime. The animation is purely done in Blender. It's really good and so no more spoilers. Desert Island by Lukas Rusinek. This animation may look simple, but for those who have tried grease pencil sketching, they must know how hard it is to draw in 3D space. You need a lot of helper objects just to draw. And Lukas made it look simple. Great job. Departure from Night by Bono Yuki. Behold this. This is still a work in progress, but it's looking real good. When you see this screen, please don't click it off. There's always some cool stuff we leave until the very end. First, our color ebook is on discount right now. Please use the link in the video description. Limited code count. Second, there are a lot more animations in the show notes. And third, do you want to make anime looking shading? A bunch of tutorials are linked. This show is made possible by these kind-hearted people. Please thank them kindly. Before we go, one final question. How is your journey into the NPR rabbit hole thus far?