2d style materials in 3d animation

in the past few years there's been a bit of an explosion when it comes to 3D animation with 2D shading Styles and a lot of these effects really aren't that hard to achieve with blender as long as you understand some key Concepts let's check it [Music] out the topic of stylized rendering is actually pretty wide there are whole communities dedicated to non-photorealistic rendering so I'll narrow it down to a few Concepts there's cell shading or flat shading outlines and 2D elements for a more drawn look screen tone which is common in comic books and painterly shaders that mimic brush strokes and if you want you can mix and match any of these to come up with your own style cell shading is a concept that comes from 2D animation when colors were painted onto sheets of clear Celluloid it was common that they only used solid colors with no gradients because blending colors added a lot of complexity to the painting process you can see the style being used now in the spiderverse movies nimona and the Mitchells versus the machines the most automatic way of doing this to everything in your scene is by using the compositor make sure to press this use nodes button and then bring in a posterized node that's literally it you can adjust this if you want a different amount of colors or maybe put a brightness and contrast node at the beginning if you think it's too dark and you can view everything without rendering now thanks to this viewport setting as a little bonus here's a setup to make everything pixelated if you're going for a Retro Game aesthetic if you want a little more control over the cell shading effect then try this method instead select an object and go to the Shader editor make a new material and use the Shader to RGB node this node is responsible for most of the Magic in this video and it only works with the EV render engine so make sure you're using Eevee and not Cycles now we have a few options first is to use a color ramp set this to constant and now you can move these stops around change the colors to whatever you want and you can add more colors too this alone will give you a ton of options and if you don't want it completely flat then you can keep this set to linear or try the other options this will work best when you leave the color of the principled Shader set to White otherwise your model will tend to be really dark and give you less control you can also try changing the roughness or metallic to get some different results other shaders work with this method too and most other videos you find about this will use a diffuse Shader for the most accurate colors you should set your color management to standard I only really use this mode for cell shading though and depending on your lighting setup you might notice that the colors aren't completely flat so one way around that is by selecting your light and in the properties turn Shadow off the lighting won't be as accurate like objects won't cast Shadows onto each other but it will be flatter you can also make the size of your lights as small as possible and this helps too one problem with the color ramp is that if you want to reuse it and turn it into a node group then you can't control the color or where the stops are because it doesn't have any inputs so if you want that then you can use a map range node or a math node set to greater than for the map range node you can control how big the transition is by changing these two values and you can push them really close together to make it look sharp here's a setup that can be used for two colors and it's just controlling the factor of a mixed color node and here is one that uses three colors and you can make groups that use as many colors as you want using this method for a more in-depth look at how this works water for a more in-depth look at how this works you can check out the video on my second channel the math node set to greater than works the same way except it will only give you sharp edges with no gradients if you want a single object to have a bunch of colors you can copy this material and change the color for each one but usually I'll use an image to control the color instead I made this color palette that's free to download from gumroad and I just select faces and move them around and scale them in the UV Editor to change the color what I'm showing next should work for any image you're using though for this group that uses three colors I'll put the image into the middle color slot then get a mixed color node set to multiply and plug the image into the first color slot the second slot I'll put a darker color like a dark blue and now the factor will control how dark it gets we can do that same thing for the other color slot but set it to add and choose a lighter color and that will give us highlights I like using this method because you can swap the main color out with anything and it usually looks pretty good the map range node has a few other tricks like if you set it to stepped linear it looks like this and you can choose how many steps you want all the steps will be evenly spaced so you don't have much control but if it looks good to you then you can use it you can also set it to vector and Ste linear and it will actually split the colors of your Shader into solid colors like this so this would be a good way of making an existing material look cell-shaded again you don't have very much control when using this method but it leads to another interesting idea of treating the red green and blue channels of our color differently you can use a separate color node to split the color into three channels and if you make a red green and blue light this lets you do things like add rim lights that have different colors I'll usually just use the red channel for the main color and for the other channels use a mixed color node set to add or multiply to mix them together lightning boy Studio has a video about this if you want to see more the last cell shading tip is for when you don't want to use lights you can actually fake light Direction by using the normal from a texture coordinate node and a vector math node set to dot product then change these values to decide the light Direction like if you want the light coming from straight up then set the zv value to one or you can use this normal node for a different way to control the direction and this could be a nice option if you want some objects to be lit individually next is is about making outlines but at this point you might be wondering if I'm going to keep talking about Vector math and using terms like dot product well math comes up a lot in my videos but don't worry because there are free and easy ways to learn about these topics like with brilliant who is sponsoring this video brilliant is the best way to learn math and science because they make it interactive and fun I just started the creative coding course for free and it's covering topics like conditionals and Loops which could really help people trying to learn geometry nodes and blender especially with the new simulation Zone that's basically all about loops but honestly you'll start noticing how brilliant can help you in your everyday life once you start learning any of the stem topics they offer and whatever your skill level brilliant customizes content to fit your needs you can take a quiz when you sign up and it will match you with content at your level and figure out what interests you and you're watching my videos so you probably like learning new skills and they have thousands of lessons so something will definitely Peak your interest it's been really easy to fit into my busy schedule because you can use it on your phone or computer which means you can be learning with brilliant pretty much anywhere and if you get stuck there are hints and step-by-step solutions to explain problems to you and help you make sense of everything plus look how slick these animations are I'm a visual learner so these actually help me a lot so give brilliant a try for free for 30 days just use my link in the description or go to brilliant.org joyc and the first 200 of you will get 20% off Brilliance annual premium subscription that's brilliant.org joyc check it out before the offer ends outlines are all over the place in 2D animation and in recent movies you can spot them in spiderverse and the bad guys especially small details like face lines for emphasis for the outline there are a few options first is with a frel node or a layer weight node either of these outputs will work and you can put that into a math node set to less than this will give you a black outline that changes width depending on the angle of the surface you're looking at you can either multiply this to keep it black or you can control the factor of a a mix node and choose the colors you want it looks nice but it's not a good option if you want the width to be consistent another option is what people call the inverted hole method add a solidify modifier and for this you'll need a second material so add a new slot I'll name it outline change this to emission and set the color to Black now make sure you have back face coling turned on and I'll usually set Shadow mode to none as well back in the solidify modifier we can add some thickness flip the normals and set the material offset to one and that should give you an outline all of these settings basically make it so we're only seeing the inside faces that are created with the solidify modifier and you can do the same thing in Geometry nodes too if you want to add some other effects to it like making the outline wiggle this works fine for a lot of models but it gets weird with some shapes next is using the grease pencil outline option and this is nice because you can use it to outline a single object a collection or even the entire scene select an object press shift a and under grease pencil choose one of these three options I'll choose object line art now this only works when you're using a camera so make sure you add one and that it's pointing at your object when you're not looking through the camera it looks pretty broken but through the camera it all comes together you can press n to open this panel and use the lock camera to view option if you want the camera to follow wherever you look the outline is actually a separate object and you can select it to access the settings in the properties you can change the thick Ness material and the object it outlines under Edge types you can change where it's placing the lines like if you only want the outside then you can set it to silhouette and disable the other options or you can outline everything you can use an image texture to make The Strokes look more stylized too and you can add grease pencil modifiers like noise if you want it to Jitter like this next is freestyle and you can find that under render properties just enable that and when you render it will automatically give you outline Under The View layer tab you can find all these other options similar to how grease pencil Works freestyle works well but I don't really like to use it mostly because you have to render to see the result there's also this tool by Alan Wyatt called the line art curve modifier it's made with geometry nodes and it does a really good job of emulating ink outlines and pencil sketches there's a link for this in the description grease pencil is also a great way of adding 2D animated parts to your 3D scenes like adding lines to faces just add a bleak Bleak just add a blank grease pencil object with shift a go into draw mode go to the part of your animation where you want a crease to appear and draw a line right here I duplicated the frame on the timeline with shift d and moved it to where I wanted the animation to start then I scaled it down in edit mode and used the ineter tool to add all the in between frames you can also add blank key frames in draw mode by pressing I or you can put auto key frame on and draw every frame if I wanted to use this regularly I'd copy paste the frames wherever they're needed but there are probably easier ways to go about it I honestly haven't worked with grease pencil all that much I do know that you can rig and weight paint grease pencil just like a mesh though and this is nice if you want permanent 2D elements to be part of your character like for this I just parented some Strokes to the Head bone and the tie is parented to the body bone next is about half tones and Screen tones this is a common pattern you'll see in comics where instead of solid colors or gradients you get these little dots that people call half tone dots originally it was used as a way of printing different Shades of Gray while only using black ink and it's still used with modern printers that create everything by only using CMYK half tones and in comics and manga some people use screen tone sheets that are like transparent stickers with different patterns on them and they stick them on top of drawings and cut them out with a razor blade in 3D animation spiderverse used this a lot as a reference to comic book art in blender this is pretty easy to reproduce again let's use the Shader to RGB node in a math node set to greater than now most of the variety we're getting will come from what we plug into the greater than node let's use a voro node and plug the distance in get a texture coordinate node and plug in the camera Vector now if we turn the randomness down set this to 2D and turn the scale up it'll start to look pretty similar one problem is that the dots are white instead of black so you can flip that around with a mix node just set these values to one and zero you can also adjust these values to change the dot sizes and you can mix this with everything else using a mix node just like with the first outline method when using this camera option it'll look flat from every angle but if we zoom in then the dots will get closer so it is still using perspective if you want it to be completely flat you can use the view Vector from the camera data node and now the dots will be the same size no matter how far away you are this view vector and the window Vector are pretty similar except the window squashes the texture when you resize the window and and the view Vector doesn't do that now you can get some cool Variations by rotating this with a mapping node or switching the voronoi out for a wave texture to get these lines If instead you want them to change size and Bands then you can put a color ramp set to constant right here the position will change the size and the color will change where each band is next we have painterly effects where you can see brush strokes and you see a lot of this in Arcane as well as mutant Mayhem and the Star Wars Clone Wars show I know in Arcane this was mostly done manually with texture painting which is a lot of work but will give you the most control now this is a big enough topic that it deserves its own video and once again lightning Boy Studio has you covered with a video about projection painting similar to Arcane to touch on it briefly you can start texture painting by going into texture paint mode and clicking this button to add a new image for the base color and if you're using blender 4.0 the add new image button moved to over here if that doesn't work then try making a new material first you also need to make sure your object is UV unwrapped so do that if it isn't anyway once you add that image you should be able to paint directly on your model you can change the color brush size and strength over here and other brush options are over here sometimes it gets laggy and I found that maximizing the window helps and you can do that with control space bar while hovering over the window you want I got some texture brushes from Craft Reaper on gumroad and they work pretty well to give different patterns that look look less like the default airbrush blender gives you but you can use whatever images you want using the texture options here you can get some really nice results if you paint some lighter and darker areas as if you're painting the lighting directly onto the model actually if you wanted you could just bake the lighting directly onto the model and then paint over that and use those colors as a starting point I usually use the free add-on bake lab for baking doing this manually is a ton of work so here's a more automatic method with nodes make sure your model is shaded smooth get a geometry node and plug the normal into the normal what we're going to do is change the normal right here which is responsible for controlling what the model looks like when light hits it so let's put a voro texture in here and make sure the position is plugged into the normal this is basically pixelating the normal so it's only made of solid colors and that makes the model look like it's only made of flat surfaces but in a pretty random organic way to make it look more like brush Strokes add a noise texture use the object coordinate get a vector math node and we're going to add the color to the normals for more control subtract it by 0.5 and add another Vector math node set to scale and that changes the strength then change the scale and detail to make it look more like wet or dry brush Strokes you can also change the voro to smooth and that will make the flat spots blend into each other a little more using this in combination with other cell shading methods can give some results that look more like watercolor like this with the color ramp but you could also just put an RGB curves node or a brightness contrast node and mess with the levels just to change the colors a little if you want more color variation try mixing in this color output or you can separate the color first and it will give you this grayscale value that you can use to just make the colors lighter or darker now if you plan on using any of these effects for an animated character and you don't want them to move around like this then bake them into an image and they should move in a more natural way I really like this method but if you want your results to look more like an actual painting then you'll either want some sort of postprocessing filter like in my older painting video or better yet use the Live Paint filter tool by Alan Wyatt it does a great job creating realistic results and that's pretty much it so have a play around with it and if you want the file from this video you can get it on patreon maybe you'll like one of these videos next thanks for watching and have a good one

Channel: Joey Carlino

Views: 253,918

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Id: AtetvOEcZt8

Length: 16min 48sec (1008 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 30 2023