Hi all,
I’m fairly new to blender and was wondering in it’s possible to achieve 3d look shading and contouring from hatching stokes in Blender. Like this image below, it’s where you can use hatching strokes to determine where shadows are in the sketch and then be able to make a normal map that accurately displays the heat distribution in accordance to the sketch. Looking forward to hearing anyone’s thoughts and ideas, especially those who are well versed in Blender.
I could see this working as a special modifier for the new grease pencil objects we are getting in 2.8. We could tell the modifier which layers in the grease pencil object have the hatching and contour lines, and the normal map generated could be used to shade the layers in the object that are used for fill colors. That would be another nice 2.5d feature.
You should make a proposal for this as a grease pencil modifier on rightclickselect.com. The developers check that site every now and then for ideas for features.
If you want to do this with the tools that are available, then you should know that krita already has a brush for painting normal maps:
Using both blender and krita you can do this sort of thing right now. You’d paint both the drawing and normal map for it inside krita, import the drawing as an image plane in blender, then use the normal map in the material for the plane to add a sense of depth.
To do this all directly inside blender, you can import the image as a plane, subdivide it using the multires modifier with the simple option on (6-8 subdivision levels should work), then sculpt on top of it to create the depth. This method is probably the easiest option you have.
