 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. And here are the highlights. First, we will chat with Ruki Kuri on her character render secrets. Second, the ultimate hair modeling setup. And, L.A. NPR's developer is okay. Now let's start with the news. Good news it is. Blender 2.82 just released. It has a stylized splash screen by Andriy Rosohango. And even more good news. You can download the scene for free from the Blender cloud. I mean look at this scene. Fun colors, fun style, almighty in its NPR-ness. So much bling. When modeling hair it can often get complex and uncontrollable very quickly. To solve that, a version of reality made this ultimate flat modeling for anime hair tutorial. The core idea is to make working with mesh hair manageable even with extreme complexity. With the benefit of keeping the hair mesh topology simple and clean for shading, line art and texturing. The tools are the curve modifiers, lattice objects, the simple deform modifier and lattice modifiers with a few empties here and there. For the front and back hair geometry the setup will be similar. We have a curve from the top of the head to the front or back of the head. This curve is a helper object to do the first stage of the shaping of the hair. Be careful with the curve object. If you don't set the tilt right, the curve modifier axis will never be right when you edit the hair plane. The second stage is deforming the hair using a simple deform modifier. Bend is used with an empty as a pivot point of the bend. The deform angle of about 200 degrees will cover more than half of the head. Move the empty close to the top end. The third stage deformation is done on the lattice object with a lattice modifier. And here's where it might get confusing. We are not directly deforming the plane anymore. In fact, the deformation chain looks more like this. The lattice object is modified by the curve modifier, then further deformed by a simple deform modifier. The plane mesh, aka the hair mesh, does not need the other modifiers. A single lattice modifier linked to the lattice object will deform it to the previous shape. We only use the plane in the earlier stage to be able to see the deformation and orientation. To cover the transition between the front and the back hair mesh, we have two curves on the side of the head to deform a much simpler hair mesh. The rest of the video is the modeling process for the flat hair plane. If you have the basic setup done, modeling complex and clean topology hair will be extremely fast and easy, pretty much the ultimate hair modeling setup. We hope you take your time with this tutorial because it is really worth your time, and it will save you much time as well. Here's a quick tip by At Andrea Monzini to rotate canvas when working on grease pencil. In the right sidebar, the N key sidebar, find the view option and activate lock camera to view. Next, press shift and number pad 4 or 6 to rotate the canvas. When you are done, deactivate lock camera to view. Now you can draw lines from your favorite angles, and for most of us, this is a real armsaver. At Rookie Curry, revive the missing art of the shadow mesh. The mesh is transparent from view, but can cast shadows. The shape of the mesh will be the shape of the shadow, and it can be anywhere you want it to go. It's an old trick. But just because a trick is old, doesn't mean it's not a good one. The setup in blender render is simple. You just tick cast and cast only in the shadows option in the material, and you're done. In Eevee, the setup is more involved but not too complex. The default shadow in Eevee is very low quality, so set the shadow quality to the highest possible for your PC. For the material of the shadow mask, we use the shadow ray as a factor to make the mesh transparent and cast shadow. Then we have to set the materials blend mode to alpha blend. With that, we have clean shadows and anywhere we want them. If you have not used this by now, please start using it. Also, rig these shadow meshes to your characters. We have a few more bonus tutorials. Number 1. Animated cartoon ocean effect by Toots by Kai. A simple setup with a great output style. Number 2. Using custom arbitrary output variable passes, or AOV passes, for NPR with cycles by NodeSpaghetti. You can put the AOV output node in your shader node tree, and it will be exposed as a custom render pass for use in the compositor. Number 3. Making a tune shader with dynamic outlines by Lightning Boy Studio. Part 2 in the tune shader series. If you have seen part 1 last month, you don't want to miss this one. And number 4. 2D style rendering in Blender by Lance Fan, which is a two-parter where he shows the shading process for a more 3D looking character in cycles. The amount of details are mind-numbing, but the results are very nice. Maybe you can simplify this setup complexity and still get a similar result. All the links to these tutorials are of course in the show notes. Time for community updates. NPR development cannot be done without the people. With the novel coronavirus outbreak, the NPR community has been a bit unsettled when they learned that the LENPR developer lives in China. So we got in touch with Wu Yiming to ask him about a situation. Here's what we got. It's his last semester in university, so naturally things got very busy. His university has been avoiding the quarantine remotely via the internet. That isn't as smooth sailing as one might have hoped. He said, It's not a single problem. Just everything that's going on right now makes it really weird to do anything, especially handling the school. As for the coronavirus situation, several provinces in his area have removed monitoring stations from the main roads. So he can move around provided that he brings a health card with him, although there are frequent stops to get his temperature measured. He's grateful that the community asked about his situation and he said that LENPR wouldn't be possible in the first place without the support of Blender Community. We're certainly glad he's alright and wish him the best of health. You must have seen these 3D renders and they look very hand-drawn. We chatted a little bit with At Ruki Kuri on what makes her character renders stand out. And here's what she said. 1. It's super important to simplify the planes of the face. Doing so has a carry-on effect in that you get much more consistent line results. Then there's the actual model topology where you want to build the shadow shapes into the topology for later vertex normal editing for nice shading. 2. Build your model to be seen in 2D. Apply a flat or tune shaded material early and keep checking it. 3. Don't over-detail if you're trying to emulate cartoons. It's easy to do so in 3D, but traditional animation artists have to draw the same character over and over so the designs are streamlined and typically don't include a lot of frivolous details. 4. Study the best models you can find, i.e. ARC System Works. Study good models, try to figure out why and how they did certain things. 5. The shading. Don't rely on generated shading, control it. Use shadow masks, edit your normals, and always simplify. 6. Study color. Study artists who have great color. And look into color theory. Of course BNPR has some great resources on that. 7. Don't just use black outlines for your line art. Use color and play with the darkness for different results. 8. Render using multiple layers and edit the final result in your image editing program of choice. Especially when you want that X factor of 3D looking 2D, even small manual edits make a big difference. 9. For post-processing, have a look in mind that you're going for. For modern anime, slightly blur the image, add a soft glow, and kill the digital look if you can. 10. Study what you want to emulate. Look at the shapes, shadow shapes, etc. Knowing some 2D also helps a lot. And these are her secrets. These are pretty deep things, stuff you will work on for years. You can put them as milestones in your NPR journey. As a bonus, she prepared a few images for simplifying the face planes for NPR looks. The link to them is in the show notes. The preliminary work on the abnormal add-on is ongoing. Cody Winchester is currently linking up the new UI to the normal editing display shown in the last update video. When the UI is linked and bugs are fixed, coding the normal editing add-on can start. This is exciting and we can't wait. We know you've been waiting for this, so may I present the NPR artworks of the month? Please enjoy. By Kai Miri is a great render. It introduces subtle NPR elements. The glows in the eyes are flat meshes and the flame as well. The sweat drops are shadeless. Without using inverted hole, the surface line art blends very well. The 2 secrets for the line art? First, the lines aren't black. And second, the lines are masked off in the bright areas. Great job! Now let's ogle at 3 awesome stylized animations. Make Love is an animation by Gencho Yasuda. The title has a weird name and not to be taken at face value. It's a trailer kind of animation, but it is a full animation. Everything looks very well done. Del Tiempo by David Cabrera is a work of love. It's done using the combination of a few open source softwares. Projection mapping is used in all the backgrounds. It gives that pseudo 2D feel. There is a breakdown video for one of the shots. A very cool setup, so be sure to watch that as well. This is the third trailer for Juan Carmadeo's The Garden of Forking Paths. Look at that, every frame is a painting. We can see so much care and love put into it. Gorgeous. We have a few more NPR animations in the show notes. Those are also very well done. So go watch them after the show. And that's it for this month's show. The quality of the artworks is really skyrocketed. Now it's time for you to digest all of them via the show notes. The links are in the video description. Please subscribe if you have not, and you can find us in these places as well. This show is very underfunded, and it takes a lot of research and time to make. So please go to our Patreon page and become a patron. These are the awesome people funding the creation of this show currently. Thank you. You guys are keeping the show running for everyone. Before we go, one last question. What are your NPR struggles at this very moment?