I’ve been learning 3D with Blender, and had a specific question relating to the the image above. This is a screenshot of a video that the artist Eran Hilleli worked on. Hilleli’s work has a visual aesthetic that I see often around the gaming and 3D illustration world. Does anyone on here know how this flat/minimalistic visual aesthetic would be achieved in Blender? The planes of the models are not defined; however, there is a basic definition of light and shadow on the models as a whole.
As far as shadeless materials go, it looks like the technique is to mix an emission shader with a diffused shader; however, this still leaves me wondering how they managed to add shadows to the models. I don’t think they painted the shadows in.
In the animation the shadows are moving seamlessly around the moving surfaces according to the light source. I definitely don’t know enough about Blender to conclusively say that they aren’t painted on, but it seems like it’s something that is achieved using an algorithm rather than by human hand.
So I guess the question is: How are they making shadeless materials have…shade? hah
Quite frankly, it’s much easier to get this kind of set up in Blender Internal than with Cycles. It may be best to point yourself over to the downloads section of the Blender NPR site and study the files and approaches they show there.
