 This show was brought to you by these lovely people. Hey there, you beautiful NPR enthusiasts! Get ready for a show you'll want to watch again and again. We have a special show for you this time. It's all about projection painting and mapping for anime backgrounds. Welcome to the BNPR show! A celebration of stylized and non-photoreal rendering. Before diving into the main course, feast your eyes on these. Now let's see what's been brewing with some beer updates. We just released the first development update of the beer front end for malt. Beer's main goal is to allow shader creation fast, easy and intuitively using the LayerStack system. Development is handled by Alice Laurie or better known as atbees.mo on Twitter. There are nine milestones for the development. Currently, Alice has finished the first two milestones with these features. Beer layers, beer materials, beer panel, mask support, solo and mute layers, the 12 common blend modes and input layers that can use either the basemesh info or prior layer as the input for the layer itself. You can test beer right now. Please follow these instructions closely. There will be more development updates and soon we'll be able to help even the most beginner NPR artists create jaw-dropping materials. And as promised, projection painting and mapping. You have seen this a few times in our shows. So what is it and why is it so cool? Let's start with the projection mapping. It's a process of projecting a flat texture to some simplified mesh. Which means you do not have to add all the details to gain fidelity. Projection mapping is fun, but not as fun as projection painting. It's the same process, but you're painting in the details. In this last BNPR show for 2021, we will introduce you to the wild and fun world of projection painting, specifically for anime landscape backgrounds. You will need a few pieces of hardware to truly enjoy projection painting. First, a pen tablet with pressure sensitivity and a GPU with four or more gigabytes of VRAM. Let's quickly set up the simplest scene for projection painting. We need a plane and a camera. Subdivide the plane so that each face is almost squared. UV unwrap the plane. Now add a texture. Depending on your VRAM size, you may want to go one, two, or even four times the render resolution. Then add this material and set the texture to get painted. And now it's time to paint. Just kidding, April Fools. Well, I know it's December, but I mean, that's why you didn't expect it, right? Well, okay, some of you might get stuck and like many others who have painted before you, there are a number of gotchas that will stop you on your journey. One, you cannot paint because the face direction is flipped. A flipped face is red when the view part option is toggled. Two, you might have skipped the UV unwrapping of the mesh. Please do that now. Three, you may not have the correct materials assigned or the wrong texture. Often this is the hardest part to figure out. If you have copied the material shown here, create only one texture and it is assigned on the material and you select the same material and texture slot, you should be good to go for painting. If you have more than one mesh, you might have been selecting the wrong mesh for painting. If the mesh is invisible, go to Object Properties, click the bounds to display the bounding box of the mesh. And now we'll let you know a few cool tricks. Trick number one, parent the plane to the camera if you want the camera to control the plane. Or parent the camera to the plane and let the plane control the camera. Either way, it should be fine for the next step. Trick number two, since we are in 3D space, we have a lot of helper tools. Since the canvas is transparent, we can use meshes behind the canvas to aid in composition and perspective. Trick number three, if we want our imagination to run wild, try this one. Using the World Grid plane, set up the horizon line, the view height and the vanishing points. A note, each time an object rotates, the vanishing points will change, so don't worry too much about them. Use the grid to plan the depth of the scene. Also, use it to vary the terrain while you paint. Trick number four, remember to adjust the focal length to get the best result for your landscape. When you're done with any of these tricks, remember to resize the canvas to fill the camera view. For this first painting, which has only a single layer, we'll look how to paint grass. For grass, regardless of length, you don't have to paint every single blade. I mean, unless you want to. But in NP-art, less time painting is more time to enjoy the better things in life. Here's one way to paint grass very quickly. Paint the grass zones. Make the zones fluffy. Now, paint a few grass blades. Reference real grass if you want to get the grass looking unique. Next, lower the strength of the brush on a gentle falloff and slightly tint the grass for variation. And just like that, you have nice looking starter grass. Does it look greener on the other side to you? Anyway, for the second painting, we have more planes to work with. With many planes available for painting, we need to make sure we're painting on the correct plane. Just pay attention to the indicator on the outliner. Yeah, this little guy right here. Okay, let's learn how to paint clouds. Set the falloff to full. Add a cloud texture. Set the texture angle to random. Add a little bit of jitter on the stroke. And change the material transparency blend mode to alpha blend. Now paint a cloud shape. For the shadow color, set a lower brush strength. And then poof, you got a cloud. For the third painting, the whole scene is 3D now. A 3D projection painting gives the most freedom with a minimal mesh manipulation. Try saying that three times fast. One key advantage, unlike painting on flat planes, we can still change the composition later on. But a note, please pay attention to your VRAM while painting on many meshes. You don't want to run out of VRAM mid-painting or blender will crash. So make sure to save often. If you are close to running out of VRAM, save the painting, close blender and reopen the file. Your VRAM should be lower every time you do that. Let's learn to paint foliage. Add a leaf texture. Set the mapping to view plane with rack and random turned on. For the stroke, we need a little bit of jitter. With brush strength of 1 and a pressure off, we can start painting the foliage. To paint the inner part of the foliage, lower the brush strength and use a soft fall off. Turn off effect alpha. Do not paint the shadow too flat. When that is done, we will paint the bright side again. Make a hard fall off, add jitter to the stroke and add the texture with rake and random enabled. Now you know how to paint basic foliage. So with clouds, grass and foliage, these are the basic elements of any anime style painting. If you want more, we have a mini anime background painting course with all three scene source files included so that you can ogle at how these paintings were painted. You'll also get the textures and tips on getting the right brushes to handle background paintings. But we will not leave everyone empty handed in this video. Here are three very important tips to make your paint anime backgrounds quicker. One, fill a huge area with few colors quickly. Then vary the hue in the area. Two, don't paint one object with too many details and another object with too few details. Always use colors or shapes as hints when you need to paint repeating objects. And three, the most important tip, don't forget to save. You do not want to repeat a painting if Blender decides to crash. So now, open Blender and start painting those anime backgrounds. Please get the mini course while you're at it. Cyber Katsu 2 by Dylan Gu. Someone turned up their production quality a few notches. The colors. The few names working on this bought our color e-book, specifically this book. Suspicious, isn't it? Huh. Modern Siren, music video by Chunmu Studio. The shading is done via Eevee and Malt for the outlines. The ocean modifier was preferred for the ocean for its lightweightness. Meanwhile, Mantaflow was used for splash effects. In the tsunami shot, the ocean modifier and lattice modifiers were used to simplify production. Work smart and not too hard. Very nice. Blown Apart. Be Branding Blitz by Tiny Media. Oh my, Tiny Media. Whoever read the script, double thumbs up. Smooth. Go watch it if you have not. You probably know what we're going to say here. Please go to the You Got It, the show notes. We've got a lot of goodies in there. And the show is made possible by these kind-hearted people. Please thank them kindly. Before we go, one final question. Do you have an anime background that you've always wanted to reproduce?