Hi there, I’ve been playing with Blender materials again and finally figured out how to acheive this render effect on hiroshi saito’s site (See ‘beyond the border.png’:
There are now some more NPR effects for your delectation at the link above. Just to whet your appetite these are hopefully the start of a collection to be added to the next materials library which will have a brand new home away from all that geocities naffness…
I really like this effect, so here is a quick tute. It takes quite a bit to set up but I think its worth it:
Firstly, there are two components to this - the two-tone shading which is an old trick that many will know already, and the ‘sketch guide-lines’. This is only really going to work on low-res geometric shapes, though you can get some interesting effects with high res ones too. In the following step-through assume that we are using a cube…
Firstly, the material
Create a shadeless material in the colour of your choice and apply it to your object.
Now add a blend texture (diagonal is best) to the colour channel and change ‘mix’ to ‘mult’. Change the input from the default ‘Orco’ to ‘Normal Vector’ (im using Tuhopuu terms here, Publisher may be slightly different).
Give the blend texture a colorband and set the 1st color to white (alpha = 1), and the 2nd to black (alpha = 1). Move the slider for colour 1 to about 0.4 and the one for colour two to about 0.6.
That’s it for the material. The result is a two-tone material with a sharp toonlike transition between the two.
Now the sketch lines…
Take your cube and duplicate it twice. Its easier if you move each duplicate to a different layer.
The original cube will be for the toon shaded material. Scale it down a tiny amount (we’re talking 0.99 here).
To the 2nd cube apply a new material, black in colour with ‘shadeless’ and ‘wire’ enabled. This will give an outline to the shape. (I know Blender has an edge renderer but the lines are thick and hard to control).
Now go to the layer with the 3rd cube. In this layer create a plane, delete all but one vertices and then extrude one unit in each direction to give a 6-pointed star. (Sorry, no pictures hope that makes sense).
Give this new shape the black, shadeless, wire material and parent it to the cube.
Select the cube and use the animations button (F7) to select ‘Dupli verts’. This will create an instance of the star at each vertex of the cube.
Now when you render against a white background you should see something like the effect in my image.
For the icing on the cake, keyframe the size of the star shape on frame 1, go to frame 2, scale it up and key it again. Now when you render with motion blur turned on you will get a nice blurred tapered end to your lines.
Hope that all made sense. I’ll put a .blend on my wip page in a while.
