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Marius Oberholster Hey! I'm having an incredible learning experience, not only learning how Blender works (yes, still learning), but also about Open-Source and the incredible software available. Stick around!

Style watch

April 29, 2014
Hey all!

I totally encourage you all to check out this post.

When you do research on how anime's are made (and any old cartoons), you find that the backgrounds are almost always hand painted. As far as Blender work goes, there's no way (unless GOD tells me to), that I'm going to hand paint every background for a project I'm currently working on. This is a test of an environment with a painterly look to the background and foreground that would make up part of the same elements:

Now, Picture to people and Akvis have both by far exceeded what I thought existed today and while these are really really amazing, they do not fit the brief... Blender has to process it's 3D backgrounds in realtime and when I tried baking everything, it just did not work. Not only was the resolution too low, but the maps come in various parts that need to be layered. It's not practical for what I want to achieve, so we need to find a way to do this in Blender, and while it's not even close to perfect, I found something close enough for what I need:

(really brightened up for clarity)

As you can tell, I used 3D models for my backdrop, but I assure you, the effect is 2D all the way, so it can be applied to pictures as well. In the above case, I applied it only to certain materials, to prevent it from messing with the character, glare and other active components that use elements like Freestyle.

Here is a before and after before I show you how to do it.
Before > After

Zoom:

(top right corner zoom)

As you can see, it's not perfect, but it still does a good job. Doing this in Blender is super easy.

All you need is:
 - An image input (whether it be an imported image, set apart material, etc.)
 - Filter > Dilate/Erode node (to create painted strokes)
 - Filter > Blur node (to fade the original detail and keep the color, so the detail from the dilation and erosion is clear)
 - Color > Mix Node (to color the dilation and erosion result)

Plug them in like this:


Note: Your image input does not have to come from an image outside of Blender. For some reason I really am compelled to keep saying that.

Go ahead and give this a try! :D
Remember to like and share if you liked this simple technique!

Have a great one!

Thank YOU!!!!!!!!!
 

Toon Shading_an improvement

April 25, 2014
Hey there everyone!

Firstly, I want to say thanx to the people from the Blender Facebook group here and more precisely, here.

I found out a lot about toon shading here, though it did not produce what I wanted - it did however bring me a heck of a lot closer, haha. I would never have thought of using full oversampling nor about turn the auto ray bias off, so huge thanx there!

Though these methods are great, there are issues here. If you leave on the auto ray bias, you get this (see the collar are...
Continue reading...
 

Normal something

April 23, 2014
Hey all!!

Finally back with another QBT and today's is about a topic that bugged me for a while. Nothing wrong with Blender, I just didn't get it until today.

Now, I've been a huge fan of node textures for a while and I've noticed that on node textures they don't always come out right in the normal department. For those who don't know what normal maps and normal influence and depth maps are, here you go:


These are created for the simple purpose of not having to use physical detail, while the sur...
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Some news

April 22, 2014
Hey all!

On the post today:
> New competition - What really happened
> New images
> A brilliant tutorial
> Blender news in one place on Facebook
> The panther dynamics facebook page and portfolio blog

> New Competitions are sometimes exciting and sometimes they can really take you by surprise. I was very surprised by Andrew's latest competition on his site, Blender Guru, and the theme is: What really happened. At first you're thrown for a loop and you think: "Wha'?!", but this actually has some very...
Continue reading...
 
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