Vector shaging What sorcery is this and can Blender do this?

This looks really neat, I would love to be able to do this.
Can Blender do something like this?

It seems super simple but there is no vector shading in textures, maybe using 2D drawing tools, I’m not figuring this out yet.

1 Like

It’s a bit vague about where the rig is implemented: only Maya? But then used in Unreal ???
Looking at the preprint:

After implementing our method as a GPU shader, we observed real-
time rendering and animation of more complex shading rigs (tens of
edits) in both Maya and Blender. We observed real-time performance
for thousands of edits (more than necessary for practical use), in
a stylised game environment, in Unreal Engine 4.

And the rig seems to be the pre-setup for the real thing as GPU shader??

Our approach also demands a time investment to pre-animate the
shading rig with all lighting changes. Animated shading rig results
produced in this paper took up to several hours to create in our
prototype. We note, however, that 3D character preparation using
existing editing techniques for stylised games, has been reported to
take months…

Anyway. As far as i understand it there seems to be some simple 2D geometrical objects projected (?) onto a (simpler version of the) 3D object which then build a toony shadow area map which will be influencing the rendered shadow particularly smoothing it or better smoothing the influence of light onto the shadow shape…

So in the end: shadow is not only detected by the light (yes or no for every pixel), but by the overall influence given of areas given like manual 2D area shadow painting but in 3D.

I had a minute to think about it.
If you have 2 models 100% identical in shape in the same space except the darker one is a fraction smaller by normals scaling(alt+s). If you apply to the darker one a shape key to poke it out at different locations that you want darkened perhaps that might work.

In theory.

1 Like