 Hey, it's the BNPR show number five a celebration of stylized rendering the highlights Face me grass the grass that will always face you fake lighting so fake it looks good Make stylized fire like how Sarah Make stylized fire like how Sephiroth touched Nebelheim Away in flow animations are done by one person and finally a stylized documentary that is going to be huge We have a lot to show you today, so let's jump into it as always We'll start with a look at some tutorials tips and tricks to help you improve First of all Cody winch with his amazing handcrafted tornado effect using only an icosphere a few empties and masses and a ton of modifiers This is how he did it. He used six layers of icosphere's after the second solidify modifier There are four icosphere layers and then are removed a layer by masking with a gradient texture The majority of the modifier setup is to isolate part of the mesh into vertex groups so that they can be manipulated separately There are gradients from big icospheres to small and vice versa or just individual layers of icosphere vertex groups Reshape the icosphere into a cylinder using a cast modifier and further enhance the shape using lattices This is helpful for animating further along down the line Then to form the mesh using a texture targeting only certain vertex groups The next steps are applying defamation and masking out unwanted meshes for each layer To color the icosphere layers differently. He used a UV warp modifier with two empties He unwrapped the mesh and added a gradient shader The UV warp modifier with the gradient vertex group will offset each layer of the mesh to the wanted color of that layer The final few steps are easy to understand Use a smooth modifier to smooth out the jaggy mesh and you twist the layers using a cast modifier You animate the empties and finally it's all done The key points to take away are how to isolate vertex groups without doing manually How to use empties to influence modifiers How to reshape and deform the icosphere How to gradient vertex groups and UV warp modifiers to color each layer with a different hue In games this is much less complex It is done using a deformed mesh which looks like the lattice mesh and a few frames of looping textures But the concepts are very similar Go watch his video for a more in-depth explanation It's very eye-opening and quite brain-numbing In Final Fantasy 7, when Sephiroth torched Nibelheim, the stylized fire surrounding Sephiroth Well, it can be created in Blender 2.8 In this tutorial by Graham Wee He shows the details on how to make that great looking stylized fire And it's even volumetric In brief, this is how it's done 1. Three different textures at different sizes and configurations are turned into one texture Each texture is animated at a different speed This is the fire 2. Three different gradients are used to mask the shape of the flame UV coordinates if you're using it on planes Generated coordinate if you want it to be inside a volume like a cube 3. A distorting, scrolling noise to increase the wavy shape as it goes up This is done by distorting a noise texture using a UV or position coordinate The processes are well explained and very easy to copy Now you can burn anything volumetrically Or you can use billboards, which we'll see how it's set up next You must have seen the grass that is always facing you by the side of a track in any racing game We used to call them FaceMe grass But the grass is a billboard Basically, a texture on a plane with a few rotation constraints In too easy CG's tutorial on YouTube, he shows these constraints and how they work The first constraint is track locked with z-axis rotation and the y-axis locked The second constraint is another track locked with z-axis rotation and x-axis locked When spawning the grass as particles, there are extra steps to make sure the grass rotates properly For that, you have to watch his video This is not only good for grass, but also great with billboard effects such as sparks, smoke and fire Here are various tips to add contour lines to your model In a series of tweets, Jan van de Himmel shows how to set up an inverted hole How to adjust the hole's thickness How to make a sketchy outline On the topic of the sketchy outline, Nicolaus Gradual gave a tip to do the same using freestyle Give them a watch or a read. All links are in the show notes There is no light in this scene It's lit using an empty object What? I know, right? This will only work in cycles for now This setup got to our attention by identity on Twitter It was originated by Pieblend via the Blender Artist's forum We'll have to optimize it even further, and here is how it's done Subtracting object texture coordinate to the empty will make a fake light vector pointing to that empty Then we normalize the vector to get the length of one By making it the length of one, we have a better known range to work in Then the dot product of the object will only shade the whole object From there, we take the value, not the vector, to make our gradient smoother To make it smooth, we just divide it by a number larger than one The final number we plug in would depend on the gradient we want the object to have Then finally, add color information to an emission shader to get the output Frankly, this is really fun to make This method will greatly enhance your NPR We just hope that it works in Eevee soon Let's now turn our attention to NPR animations A helping hand is an animation shot by SacredVision's film, Rended in Blender Render With a simple message of keeping the environment clean and healthy What is interesting to us is how he deforms the mouth of this fish from various angles It feels very 2D, very well done Small experiments are a series of short animations by Martin Kolkak We're not sure how to explain them But all we know is that even some sketchy ring orbiting an icosphere is interesting Go watch them all Samwich Day is an animation done entirely using Grease Pencil The creator, Arthur Markhole, is an animator who prefers to work with less technical stuff and wants to finish a project very quickly Grease Pencil is what is enabling him to do just that It's really great Video game at your place is done by Obi-Wan and it is very atmospheric The animation was done to test the ability of Eevee to render stylized animation All the trees and shrubs are planes with textures At first glance, you won't even notice them Clever camera work, go watch it The stylized animation Away is done by Ginz Zilbalodis from Latvia The animation was directed and produced entirely by one person Amazing The story is about a boy traveling across an island on a motorcycle Trying to escape dark spirits and to get back home Along the way, he makes a series of connections with different animals and reflects on the possible ways he ended up on the island It's part dream, part reality, and in a way the storyline or narrative is a reflection of the creative process in making the film itself Very meta, us artists can relate Anyway, it was done in Mayer and it will be released later this year Here is another of his work The first teaser of his next movie named Flow The animation is currently produced using Blender We are not sure about the plot yet, we love to be surprised You can follow his progress on Twitter and Facebook All links are in the show notes We look forward to watching the final product Artworks of the month All the cool artworks are here Let's see whose artwork got selected this month We are so impressed with this one Is using the original character design by Oromo 07 and turned a 2D image into a living 3D model Here is how it's done Oromo 07's 2D image was projected onto a Andomish then fixed the textures to fit the 3D mesh and filled in the blank spaces Later they rigged the character for animation With a bit of 3D knowledge, you can turn any 2D painting into 3D If you have a strong 2D background and design, you're a one man army Go polish your 2D skills, it will make your NPR so much more stylized Now for the news Initially, we were about to discuss how the photorealistic Pikachu and Sonic the Hedgehog both got their designs wrong Since the end results are not NPR, we have to skip them for now Now for the first news item You can now use texture brush with grease pencil Now that is something we really wanted to see in 2019 In Pepe Lan's demo of the tool, he shows how intuitive it is to sketch anything using grease pencil With the textured brushes, everything looks so stylized Wu Yiming will continue developing Lampi Art, the real-time contour renderer after his proposal got accepted by Google We have discussed what he plans to do in the last show Go watch it if you've not seen it We wish Wu Yiming all the best moving forward This is a news from us We plan to start production of a documentary discussing stylized rendering when we reach 200 patrons on Patreon Unlike this show, everyone will get to watch the documentary when it is done No early access, just one big surprise release There are two Patreon tiers Three US dollars will give you early access to the BNPR show And five US dollars will give you a few files from each show The five dollar tier is definitely worth it So please check it out The documentary will be huge Please help us make the production a reality by clicking the Patreon link below If you are new here, welcome, please subscribe Tell your friends about the show as well Then go click those cool links in the show notes There are all sorts of goodies in there And they'll lead you to even more NPR greatness If you would like to see more of the show And the documentary, we would love if you could support us on Patreon We need 200 of you to make the documentary happen You can also support us by getting anything from our store The soul-stirring digital colour mastery ebook and video bundle is on discount right now All links are in the show notes If you want to get featured in the show, please contact us We love to get your games, animations and artwork seen by more people Before we go, one last question How do you make a texture vector coordinate point towards an object?