Non-photographic Render

General Forums Blender Development Discussion
1

I started a course in Blender over a year ago, and will probably have to start over at this point. But before doing so, I want to ask a question:

I am a book illustrator and hope to use Blender to model my mechanical subjects. Though I am wowed by the photo realism many of you are achieving, I wonder if I will be able to render my art in a lower, more graphic appearance. I have to match my past work in style. Here is a link to what I’m talking about (the cover art on the 2 books on my home page): http://nathanclement.com/

It seems like it would certainly be doable, but I don’t want to commit time to learning and find out otherwise. Thank you.

2

It is not obvious in middle of galleries using cycles to find NPR artwork.

But I found this one.

Freestyle is the part of renderer in charge of stylized lines.
And it was used until now, mainly with Blender Render engine.

In 2.8, it will still be available. But Blender Render will not be present.
So, shaders will have to be done using Cycles or EEVEE.

And another NPR renderer for lines called LANPR is in development.

But blender 2.80 (first stable release of 2.8x series) will not be officially released before next year.

3

Thanks. I’ll look at the EEVEE video. I am not looking for line; my work doesn’t have line in it, but NPR is where I need to be. Thanks.

4

These links might help:
https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/33871/is-there-really-a-way-to-make-a-true-toon-shader-material-in-cycles

And when you are doing NPR stuff you can set the light bounces to 0, disable reflective and refractive caustics, and just use a few samples (16-64) to speed up the render.

5

You might also want to have a look at the ToonKit addon (commercial).

And BTW, it was a bit of a pain to get your homepage to show…
It relies solely on Flash, which makes it more or less unusable on many mobile devices. And even on desktop browsers most people have Flash disabled for security reasons…

6

Yes, and adobe has announced it will discontinue support for flash in 2020. Flash is obsolete. The standard practice is to use html 5 canvas for animations.

7

Also have a look at grease pencil:

Maybe even if you don’t use lines this could be useful.

Other than that, looking at your demo, I think you could achieve what you want with various shader techniques used for the toon look that have been mentioned.

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8

And while you’re implementing that, also add SSL encryption: AFAIK Google penalizes websites still running on “http://” addresses…:stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

9

Sorry if my knowledge is dated on the subject. I do have a two year degree in webpage design, but I haven’t done anything web related in 10 years. I haven’t even used canvas and javascript for animations; just flash. What method would you use to implement animations these days?

10

Sorry, my post wasn’t aimed at you, but towards the OP…
Your advice is spot on. I just wanted to point out another flaw in the OP’s website which he could get rid of when implementing your suggestion.

Sorry for the confusion!

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11

Sorry for the pain. No intent to cause pain. My site will go up soon as a static HTML.

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12

By the way I think you can do the same in Html 5.

There are even a lot of site building tools that do nice animated effects out if the box with no scripting. Wix for example.

13

Can anyone confirm that the freestyle render does work in the 2.8 build [ 2.80-41ad845531b-win64.zip ] for the 17th October? I’m on windows 10. Setting freestyle in the base opening file does NOT generate any lines and no project from 2.79 with freestyle working generates lines either in 2.8. Neither Eevee/cycles/CPU or GPU make any difference. It does seem to be calculating the lines but does not draw anything. Thanks. Dj

14

No it doesn´t . It will 88% sure be replaced by LANpr

15

David, Thanks for confirming that.

16

LANPR will not replace Freestyle in 2.80.
LANPR is a lot faster than Freestyle, able to handle heavier scenes but it is because it does not do stuff as complex as Freestyle does.
Freestyle has lots of modifiers to give a great style to lines. It supports dashed lines, textured lines, multicolored lines. This is animatable and Freestyle has an svg export.

In comparison, LANPR just offers a variable thickness according to angle from one object, for the moment.

LANPR author would like to make several changes to UI and bring new features in a next year GSOC.
So, probably LANPR would not be sufficient for some Freestyle users or stable enough for 2.80.

Freestyle Line Set Panel does not show edge types except Silhouette.
Freestyle is probably broken because of alpha status. (It works in LANPR branch.)But it should be present in 2.80.
That would be a pity to loose Freestyle in a release that would have great grease pencil improvements.