7 Ways to Make Lineart in Blender 4.0!

creating line art in 3D is essential if you want to create stylized renders more and more 3D studios are creating stylized movies and they all use line art in some way to enhance the visuals so today I'll walk you through seven different ways of making line art in blender let's start off with one of the most common ones and this is called the inverted hole technique the basic concept is that we expand our mesh then give it a black material then we can invert this expanded mesh and give it a special material so that instead of blocking the main mesh it will show up behind it we can do this in blender by by adding a solidify modifier if we change the offset to one you'll see your mesh inflate now let's go to the materials tab make a new material and change it to a background Shader this is just a Shader that doesn't react to any Lighting in our scene now make it whatever color you want the most important part here is to enable back face Cooling in 3D software your model will have a front and a back face we can see this in blender by enabling the face orientation overlay anything that is blue is a front face and red is a back face so when we enable back face coling we're telling blender that we want to see through any faces that are backwards now go back to the solidify modifier and we can invert the mesh we can do this by flipping the normals under the normals tab now we just need to assign our material blender does this with slots so just increase both of these numbers until your outline shows up in my case I have nine materials so I'm using the ninth slot you should now see your outline and you can change the size of it if you need to we have a pretty nice outline but you'll see that there are some areas that don't look right because we're expanding the mesh this expanded mesh is actually intersecting other parts of our model so you would need to go into edit mode and move parts of your model that the outline isn't intersecting anymore we can also get creative with the outlines by defining the thickness of them using a Vertex group instead of having a constant thickness I'm going to create a new vertex group called thickness and in way paint mode I'm just going to use the gradient tool and draw a gradient on the model now back in the solidify modifier we could use this vertex group and you'll see that the outline changes based on our weight painting you can also control the influence of this vertex group using the factor input this is great for removing certain areas that don't look good or making certain lines thicker all you have to do is paint the thickness using weight painting this method is great for getting outlines it's not so good at doing details but the great thing about this is that we can export this directly into a game engine and it works perfectly if we do however want to add some details to our character we can do this by simply using materials using a black material we can go in and start setting the materials on certain faces of our mesh to add lines this is as simple as it gets all we're doing is making black faces on the model to Define our lines we can then go into edit mode and if we press G twice we can slide the vertices to change the thickness of our lines if you want some specific shapes we can use the knife tool K and cut whatever shape we want then we just assign the material to these new faces this method is great for getting sharp detail but it does rely on the topology so you may have to change your model for the lines to work correctly this next method uses something called vertex colors most game engines and 3D softwares can use vertex colors in interesting ways for example some older games use vertex colors to act as lighting for the scene before game engines were powerful enough to have Lighting systems and R Trace lighting an artist could go in and paint the Shadows on light using vertex color to give the illusion of more detailed lighting so bik and blender instead of going to edit mode or sculpt mode there's another one called vertex paint blender 4. has made this process very easy so everything's already set up for you if you want we can also enable the wireframe overlay to allow us to see our wireframe now you can start drawing in the model to see our lines on our original texture we can go to the Shader editor in here we can add a color attribute node and select the vertex colors that we just created now if I mix these with our base texture we can see our line art by default all the lines are quite blurry but we can fix this by selecting faces in edit mode and then in vertex paint mode we can enable the face selection paint mask now we can draw and it will stay within the faces alternatively if we press CR X we can set the vertex colors for the selected faces and they'll stay sharp this way now you can start modifying the topology to suit your lines you might need to move some vertices or cut them with the knife tool and then you can select these faces and in vertex paint fill in the lines alternatively if you didn't want to have to select the faces each time you could just paint your vertex colors with the brush and then in the Shader editor you could add a math node change it to greater than zero and this will give you sharp lines based on your drawing you would still have to adjust your topology to suit but it's quicker than selecting faces each time the benefit to this method over the materials method is that this is non-destructive so instead of changing the material for certain faces our material stays the same but we can go in and just change the vertex colors in certain areas to create our line art it's not useful for every model but it's a valid approach and it's flexible next up is a more creative creative way of making line art and that's just drawing on a texture you'll have seen this method used in games like Borderlands and The Telltale Games and all we're doing here is drawing the detail directly onto the model's texture we can switch over to the texture paint Tab and at the top of the window find the texture slots button change it from material to single image and if you have an existing image select it from the drop down menu or you can create a new one now all we have to do is start painting on our model to create sharp lines we can change the fall off of our brush to the square one and this will make the brush sharp depending on the resolution of your texture you might end up seeing the individual pixels and that's one of the downsides to this method it's very quick and easy to create the line details but to get plain lines you might have to create a 4K or 8K texture which can lead to memory problems eventually also if you try and close blender it will give you a warning telling you that you've some unsaved images just make sure to save these otherwise you lose your progress a lot of games have used hand painted textures to create some very stylized results so if that's what you're after that texture painting is perfect for you the next method uses floating planes that sit just on top of the mesh you can see here that I have some mesh planes for the eyebrows and mouth these are actually just hidden inside the model and when I animate the face I just move them outside so that they're visible this is one of the better ways to do line art because these lines will be very sharp we're not changing the main model and we also have the freedom to manipulate and move these mesh planes however we want you can create these planes very easily by selecting some faces of your model we can then duplicate them with shift d and inflate them with alt s this will push them out slightly now we can shape this like any other mesh you can make it thinner by pressing G twice to slide vertices you can merge points together with M and if there's not enough detail you can select your edges and bevel them with contrl B to smooth out any harsh angles then just give them your line out material and you're done this is one of my favorite ways to do line art because it's so expressive and if you animate your face you can see these lines appearing and disappearing steing which gives it a really nice effect also all of this transfers over to game engines so you can have these really expressive lines in your games and they're very efficient because they don't add too many vertices to your model and they don't require any highresolution textures or special materials these last two methods are both blender specific so they won't work in any other software the first being the grease pencil the grease pencil allows us to paint on the model similar to texture painting but this time we're not painting on a texture we're painting virtual Strokes on the model and these Strokes don't exist as a m the simple way of drawing of the model is by creating a new blank grease pencil object and with this object selected in the top left you'll see there's a new draw mode button that's specific to grease pencil objects now with the draw brush selected you can start drawing in your scene you can change the brush at the top left to get some different looks you'll notice that the lines are floating in space so to fix this we can change the stroke placement at the top of the screen to surface and now we can draw on the model you might need to change the stroke offset if the lines are inter seting with the mesh or if they're too far off the mesh but we can now start drawing our details one cool thing about the grease pencil is that we can apply modifiers to the lines in the modifier style of the grease pencil object we can choose from a number of different effects to make the lines more Dynamic and stylized I'll keep this simple and just add some thickness variation to the lines with the thickness modifier all we have to do here is enable the uniform thickness check boox and then go to the custom curve section you'll already see the lines changing but if we make the curve into a hill like this then we can see that the ends of the line are thinner and the cool thing is that these modifiers will apply to any lines you draw from now on one other modifier that we can add is the line Arc modifier and this will be the most useful modifier for most people because by adding the line Arc modifier and changing the source type to scene assigning both a layer and material you'll see that your whole scene now has line art if you don't see any lines that's because this is all based off of the camera view so if your object is seene isn't in view of a camera then it won't work if we move this modifier above the thickness modifier you'll see that all these new lines now use the same thickness curve I'll walk you through a few of these settings for the line out modifier because some of them are very useful underneath Edge types you'll see a bunch of checkboxes and these determine how and when the lines will show up let's just disable everything and go one by one at the top we can change what way the lines are detected are they detected based on the Contours of the model or do they only show up on the silhouette of the model in certain use cases you might only want an outline along the silhouette of your character the crease threshold doesn't really do anything you can try changing it and sometimes it might help the big one is intersections in blender as far as I know the line art modifier is the only way to detect and draw lines where two objects intersect material borders is fairly self-explanatory it just draws a line where two materials meet the next one is my most used and I think the most versatile and this is The Edge marks to see how this works we need to go back into edit mode I'm just going to select a few edges and now if I press contr contr e and go all the way down to the bottom there's two options that you probably never noticed before Mark freestyle edges and clear freestyle edges let's mark these edges and they'll turn green and then if we go back to object mode you'll see that we now have lines showing up where we Mark those edges if any of the other methods don't draw lines where you want you can go and mark them manually this is great for getting fine controll over where you want your lines to show up the grease pencil is one of the easier methods because of the line out modifier and because we can see exactly what we're drawing but the big downside to this is that lines that are drawn manually are not attached to the mesh so when we move our character these lines won't move you can pair them to the object and then the lines will move with it but if you try to animate your character with a rig or shape Keys the lines won't follow so play around with the grease pencil modifiers because you can get some pretty cool effects but now we'll move on to the last and my favorite method of drawing Vine art freestyle ever since grease pencil came out a couple years ago people have forgotten about freestyle but I think it's the best way to do line art it doesn't do everything like intersections but you can get some really cool results with it let's start off by just enabling freestyle and we can do this in the render tab all the way at the bottom of this menu there's a check box called freestyle click it and then press F12 to render your scene rendering is the only way to see freestyle as it's a post-process effect so it won't show up in the viewport you can already see that we have some lines but it's not perfect but we can delve deeper into the settings under the view layers tab again at the bottom of this menu we have all the freestyle settings the first one that we're going to change is the crease angle we can turn this up or down and see the effect that it makes turning it down will show fewer lines because fewer lines will be above the threshold and turning it up will mean that every line will get rendered you have to find a balance but anywhere between 100 and 140 is always a good starting point then we can scroll down to the edge type settings you'll recognize most of these from the grease pencil line art settings but again just play around with them go through them one by one and see what effect they have that's the best way of figureing out what he say setting does I think the most useful one similar to the grease pencil is the EDG Mark setting if you're ever not seeing a line where you want to you can go in and press CR e and mark them as freestyle edges I'm going to leave everything at the default settings for now and skip a few sections and go down to Freestyle geometry the geometry section is where we can manipulate the image before the lines are drawn and it will determine how and when to draw the lines by default it's set to sampling which just samples the original render image but we can add modifiers to this let's just do something simple by adding the pein noise 2D modifier render your image and you can see the effect it's had so now we've taken the original image and added some noise to it but let's say I want something more sketchy I want my lines to be a bit more rough and not follow the render exactly so instead of using the sampling modifier remove it and add the guiding lines modifier make sure to put it at the top of the list like regular modifiers they operate from top to bottom now you can see that instead of some Ling the original image The Guiding lines modifier is just detecting some of the points from our image and drawing straight lines between them this doesn't look great but we can change how long these lines are back in the freestyle stroke section change the chaining type to sketchy and then under the splitting section we can sell freestyle how long we want the lines to be using the 2D length option now if we render we can see some sketchy lines go ahead and change the length of the lines to change how rough and sketchy they look we can make these lines look even more sketchy by changing the thickness under the freestyle thickness section you'll see once again that we can add modifiers to this and we're going to add an long stroke modifier and I'm sure you can imagine that this will allow us to change the thickness of the line along the stroke but instead of just using linear mapping we can change this to a curve this curve represents the stroke length on the x- AIS and the stroke thickness on the Y AIS so if we make our curve into a hill like this we can make the ends of the lines thin and the center of the lines thicker we can can also change the opacity of these lines under the freestyle Alpha section to make them a bit more see-through and then we can also add a noise modifier to the opacity to have some variation now we get something that looks a lot like a sketchy pencil one of my favorite features is under the freestyle color section the material modifier will allow us to change the outline color for different materials so we can get some cool colored pencil effects where different parts of the mesh have different outline colors we can do this by going to the object material properties and once again hit at the bottom of this menu is the freestyle line section I have a few materials so I'm just going to change the freestyle color for all of them and now you'll see when we render all of these sections now have different colors so now we have some cool sketchy lines but I also want to add a nice thick outline to my character so another great thing about freestyle is that we can have multiple types of lines using line sets I'm going to rename this one to sketchy and add a new one with the plus icon now we can control all the settings of this new line set without changing the sketchy one I'm just going to make this an outline by enabling only the Contour checkbox and making it a bit thicker now if we render you'll see that we have our sketchy lines and our thick outline you can also reorder the line sets because they're drawn from bottom to top so if something isn't showing up correctly you can move them around so that they're drawn in the right order this is one of the really powerful things about freestyle that you can have multiple sets of lines so you could get some cool effects where different parts of your scene have different line art maybe you want the edge marks of your model to be thin and sketchy when you want a really strong outline around your character or even have a character with a completely different line art style you can do all of that with line sets the last thing I want to mention about freestyle is that if we enable the freestyle lines as a render pass we can actually do compositing and the lines will be completely separate so if you wanted to generate sketchy outlines of your characters you could do that with render passes or if you wanted the lines to blow or maybe you wanted the main image to have the new blender 4.0 kuara filter will keep the line art clean you can do do that with freestyle and render passes so there you have it seven ways to generate line art and blender but keep in mind you don't just have to use one of these methods mix them together solidify is good at outlines grease pencil can do intersections mesh planes can give you nice detail and textures are quick and easy to draw you'll see at all of these examples that I've used multiple methods to achieve the final result and hopefully now you know what the different methods can be used for so play around with lineart have fun and thanks for watching

Channel: Vertex Arcade

Views: 96,247

Keywords: blender, blender 4.0, lineart, outline, anime, cartoony 3d style, blender cartoon, solidify, texture painting, tutorial, guide, walkthrough, vertex groups, grease pencil, freestyle, blender grease pencil

Id: -urA3hqzF30

Length: 16min 34sec (994 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 25 2023