NPR SPECIAL 🎨 Blender Everyday #05

Dropping by to say hi and share an important tip:

In render properties tab, Color Management Panel, change view transform to Standard for all NPR work.

Hello Pablo!

1. Are there any NPR features that are getting developed during the production of Coffee Run?

2. Any pressure you could put on the devs to review my subsurf custom normals patch would be appreciated :) developer.blender.org/D6935

Finally! You have to answer ALL my NPR questions! Mwahaha! (I'm Node Spaghetti, in the chat. Making delicious pasta for NPR shaders is my favorite thing to do!)

<h4>Low-hanging fruit:</h4> * Cycles Shader-To-RGB node? * LANPR when? * Light-linking? * EEVEE displacement? * --> Viewport compositing! <--

<h4>More specifically:</h4> * I'd like to see a handy way of hooking Grease Pencil objects to mesh surfaces, perhaps a GP that can exist in UV space (Grease Pencil as a texture?), or even a surface-deform modifier. Well, more modifiers (or even nodes!) for grease pencil is always welcome.

* More control over shadows - make objects in EEVEE unable to cast shadows or unable to receive shadows. The first is easy to hack together, the second is not. Bonus if the object/material can be prevented from receiving shadows based on light path node or specific material name!

* One major difficulty in using the Shader-to-RGB node is the dearth of information in shadow areas-- Often I have to set up elaborate lighting or normal editing to get the cels I want in a cel shader (The shadow cels are often too big!) This is because the threshold of e.g. a Greater Than node can only go so low, so close to zero. I wonder if there is some gamma-correction in the node or shading code? Even if the data is linear, it might help to gamma-correct it so that more information is present in the shadow area.

<h4>Node Requests:</h4> * **Re-Mapping Node**: Often, when making NPR shaders, I need to modify the coordinates of a texture after doing some color math on it, or I need to remap a texture that's either already been mapped in one way that must then be warped, or never had access to a mapping input (i.e. Shader-To-RGB output). So I'd like a node that allows me to warp, deform, or re-map texture coordinates after the fact.

* **Lookup Node**: I'd like to be able to do some color math, then access the final color (after the color math) for e.g. creating grass that is the color of the ground beneath (after the ground has been shaded). With a special node that finds color information at a particular point, either in World Space or UV space, I could do this. There are many other use-cases for this "Lookup" node, too.

* **Sobel Node**: I'd really love a node that can do line-detection in 3D space or 2D space, for example, for drawing lines around cels in a cel-shader (doing so with light, by creating a thin cel, produces varying thicknesses of line based on the lighting).

<h5>Vertex Color Baking</h5> Finally: I'd love to see vertex color baking in Cycles. I read through the baking code and made a devtalk thread about it (devtalk is down now, will edit and post link). I don't think vertex color baking will be difficult to implement, and it looks like implementing it for Blender will make it possible to bake vertex colors for any engine that supports baking. But I would like some feedback on what I've written about the problem so far!

Pablo, Hello, and thank you!! NPR, Great! However I am most concerned about Line Rendering, as the 'poor cousin' who needs the most help. Freestyle is slow, Post Process, poor interaction, and crashes on Fur, Hair. Leaves, Grass... and LANPR seems 'frozen' as I am building for GraphicAll.org and the builds are stuck on 2.83.2, and 'crashes' also. Any news on Line Rendering???

Hi.

There IS an addon that can save the previous positions of the 3DCursor: Gizmo 3d Cursor version 1.2.0 Test 1 .

You can find it here: blendermarket.com/products/3d-cursor-gizmo

This page shows a 1.1.0 version but there's also a 1.2.0 Test 1 version, and it's this "alpha" version that features the " Save 3Dcursor positions ".

Hi Pablo, My question is regarding GIFs/MP4 animations which are big part of NPR art. I want to know if there is a way to import them into Blender, and change the pace of certain parts using the Graph Editor, like we can do for animation originally created in Blender itself.

I wonder what happened to the Japanese developer who created the Shader-to-RGB node? Can't BF hire him? Please hire him.. I think he might have created many new & cool custom tools in last few years!

Hi Pablo and dear guests!

I'm not an often user of NPR technique, although, two things I concern:

1. Grease pencil shadows
2. SVG import-export

Any news on that topic? Thanks a lot!

P.S. Dedoze, amazing artwork! Fantastic! My mind is blown away!

Hey Pablo, I wonder about this Grease Pencil issue, I've struggled with yesterday: I 've build a scene in the Layout Workspace, did some camera animation etc. Then I wanted to paint on the buildings with Grease Pencil but it behaves not like it did in other Grease Pencil works I did before.

I could draw but when I wanted to sculpt the stroke, I couldn't set the strength there was no slider and nothing happend (2.83) in 2.82 there were strength and radius sliders but all were set to 0 (I could adjust them) but only the marker brush works. I moved to the 2D Animation and to the 2D Full Canvas Workspace but there was no difference.

I started blender again and choose in the splash screen the 2D Animation file option and in the new file 2.82 and 2.83 Grease Pencil works perfect.

Then I append a building from the scene I made before and now everything worked as aspected.

It seems that the starting Workspace has to be the 2D Animation Workspace, so that Grease Pencil can work properly? Or am I doing something wrong?

Why does it behave like this?

Thanks so much for Blender Everyday, it's my daily highlight!

Hi Pablo, How about a Blender Short film for the mix of 2D and 3D, just like the splash screen by Andry.

I spoke about cascedure earlier, and I would suggest the devs look at them and see how they do their physics-based animation workflow in order to try and push blender animation workflow forward, just a suggestion.

monring pablo hope you and everyone else is keeping safe glad to hear Tons coming back around too. My question is when are light groups/collections coming back for Eevee? this is an imperative feature for character shaders since management of lighting is important, and I would also like to bring attention to a marvellous feature from 2.7 called negative lamps that needs to make a comeback as it really helped with the stylized aspect of blenders tools, most of which sadly I don't see have any plans for coming back.

Hi Guys, I mentioned shell and fin fur yesterday, (this in't a question), but I've linked some interesting material if you wanted to have a read or pass onto people far more intelligent than myself about the matter developer.download.nvidia.com/SDK/10/direct3d/Source/Fur/doc/FurShellsAndFins.pdf

blender site is out?

I just Want you Guys to Know that, It's Really Awesome that you guys has developed NPR!!! All thanks to the Developers who Made NPR!!!!

1. So, Would we ever need Cycles NPR? Why/Why Not?
2. I wish to know Who were the great mind in the Dev Team of NPR other than Kanzaki Wataru and Clement Foucault....

just want to ask is there a way to bake displacement maps