How to Make 2.5D Art in Blender with Grease Pencil

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Today, I'm going to show you how you can use Blender and Grease Pencil to make awesome 2.5D creations. This isn't exactly a beginner tutorial, but I'll cover the basic operations and then speed through the parts where I'm tweaking things. Before I got into modeling in Blender, I just went into Clip Studio Paint and did a quick concept using the shape carving method. I have a video on the subject here. I then imported that image into Blender using the Reference option in the Add --> Image --> Options. Having a concept to reference is completely optional. It's also just fun to fiddle around and find interesting shapes. But now that I have a rough concept that I can reference, I can start modeling. Modeling! The first thing I want to do is build out the arms. I want to build them in such a way that I make each new part of the arm a child of the previous part. This will let me easily pose my robot without having to fiddle with each piece individually, and I also won't have to add any bones. I know from my reference that the joints on my robot will be extremely simple, just spheres and cylinders, so I'll add those. I'll adjust the scale of the cylinder on the Z-axis to make it a bit longer. Then to make the cylinder a child of the sphere, I'll select the cylinder first, then the sphere, so it's the active object. You can spot the active object because its outline is yellow, not orange. I'll hit Ctrl+P to bring up the parenting options, and I'll select Object (Keep Transform). And now my cylinder will move based on changes made to the sphere. Like this. Next, I'll duplicate the sphere, scale it, and parent it, and repeat the same process for the cylinder, checking each time to make sure that the joints are working as intended. I'll continue this exact process using primitives to block out the shape of the arm. [Music by eveneyes] Next, I'm going to do a rough pose on the arms, then I'll duplicate them and position them symmetrically. I didn't use a mirror modifier for this part because I ran into a lot of trouble with the parenting, and it turned out that just duplicating and mirroring it solved the issue. So all I'm doing is selecting all of the arm pieces, hitting Shift+D to duplicate, moving them over, and then right-clicking and selecting Mirror on the x-axis. Next, I'll give my angry little chef da body by bringing in a cylinder, then scaling and moving it to where I think it looks right. And so next, I'll repeat the same process I used for the arms to create the legs. And actually, I forgot the heel sphere initially, so you'll see me go back and add that shortly. [Music] I want to give my little chef a lid, so I'll go into Edit Mode, make sure I'm using the Face Selection option, and select the top face of the cylinder. I'll hit Shift+D to duplicate it, and then hit Esc to have it go back to its initial position. Then, I'll hit P to bring up the Separation options, which will let me make a duplicated face into a separate object. I'll choose to separate by Selection, as this will separate the face I have selected. Then I'll go into Object Mode and position the perfectly sized lid where I want it. I'll use a Solidify modifier to make it roughly the right thickness, and then extrude and scale it to the right shape. To add the handle, I'll add a bezier curve. Then I'll go into Edit Mode and tweak it until it's roughly symmetrical. I want my handle to have some thickness, so I'll go to the Data Panel, then the Geometry options, and I'll extrude it until it has the thickness I want. Once I'm happy, I'll go to the Object options, up here, then go to Convert, and select Mesh. Now that this is a mesh, I can use the Solidify Modifier on it to get the thickness I want. Once I'm finished, I'll select both the lid and the handle, and hit Ctrl+J to join them into a single object. I'll just quickly double check that all my parenting is working as intended, and then I'll get to posing. I'll hop into my camera, lock it to my view and find a good starting angle, then pull out another smaller 3D viewport on the side that I'll keep on the camera view so that I can always see what my camera sees even when I'm working from a different angle. Now I'll get to posing, trying all the while to maintain a sense of weight, motion, and balance. And all I'm doing to pose this is just rotating those parented objects to where I want them. Nice and easy. [Music] Oh, and here I've spotted that I've missed the heel spheres, so I'm adding those in. I'm also adding a base to ground my model and to help me with the balance of the pose. Next I'm going to add in the pan, and to do that I'll add in a cylinder, scale it down on the z-axis, and give it some shape using E to extrude, S to scale, and I to inset. I'll add another cylinder for the handle, scale it, and position it where I want it, and join the handle to the pan. [Music] I'll move the pan to the hand and pose the hand as though it's holding it, and then make the pan a child of the main part of the hand. Next, I'll add a sphere for the onion above my robot's head. I'll go into Sculpt Mode and use the grab brush to make it a little more lumpy and asymmetrical. Then, following the exact same steps as before, I'll model the pot for his other lower hand, and then pose the hand to hold it, once again I'll parent it to the main part of the hand so that they move together if I need to tweak the pose later on. And now he needs a knife, so I'm going to add a plane, then use a simple edge extrusion to get the shape I want, then use a solidify modifier to get the thickness right. Once it is, I'll pose it and parent it. Finally, he needs the mid-air sliced onion, and to make this I'm just going to add another sphere, then go into Edit Mode, turn on X-ray Mode to see through the object, and select a row of quads at a time. Like this. I'll then separate each of these rows by hitting P to access the separation menu, and choosing Selection. This way they all become their own objects. Once this is done, I'll need to fill in the open faces, so I select each slice, go into Edit Mode, hit A to select all, and then hit F to fill. Now I want my slices to be drifting apart as if they were just sliced, so I'll move them apart a bit. In order to make it easy to move the collection of slices as a whole though, I'll hit Shift and right-click to place the 3D cursor on my sliced onion, and then I'll add an Empty. I'll select all of my onion slices, and then the empty, and hit Ctrl+P to parent the empty to my onion slices, keeping the transform. Now if I want to move all of the slices together, I can just move the empty, but I can also still move each slice individually, which will help with the composition later on when I render. Now I'll just do some very simple tweaking, and it'll be on to materials! I'm gonna use the same method I did for the knife to create some bacon to go in this pan. So I'm just adding in a plane and then extruding the edges, moving them up and down and scaling them a bit to get a little bacon-looking thing. [Music] Alright, now that I'm happy with the pose, it's time for the Toon Shader! To start, I'll select the body of my robot and assign it a new material. I'll only need to make this toon shader once because I can make an editable duplicate of it when I want different colors, as you'll see in a minute. To make the shader, I'll drag up a new window at the bottom here, then switch to the shader editor. Then I'll add a Shader to RGB node to the BSDF output. And then I'll add a color ramp. Make sure to set the interpolation on your color ramp to Constant, right here. This is what'll give us those solid bands of color between the light and the shadow. This'll let us tweak the colors that appear on our object, and we can add stops using this Plus (+) button to add another color, giving us options for a highlight, a mid-tone, and a shadow color. Sliding the stops around will change how thick the bands of color are relative to the strength and distance of your light source, so if it's not looking right, try changing the strength or position of your light source and see if that helps to get the desired effect. To save time, I'm going to select all of the parts of my robot that will share the same material as the body. In this case, everything except the joints. Last, I'll select the body of my robot, so it's the active object. When they're all selected, I'll hit Ctrl+L to bring up the linking options, and then select Link Materials. Now all of my arms have the correct material applied, I'll do the same for the fingies. Then, I'm just going to tweak the lighting a bit until I'm more or less happy. Now that the main toon shader has been made, I want to add a solid background for my robot. To do that, I'll go into the shader editor and change the graph from Object to World, here. To get a solid color no matter where we look, we need to duplicate the background node... then add in a mix shader, plug the top node into the top shader slot, and the bottom node into the bottom shader slot, then add a light path node, and take the Is Camera Ray output, and plug it into the factor of the mix shader. Now we'll have a uniform color for our background no matter where we look. You can change the color of your background by changing the color on the bottom background node. And as you'll see, I was very indecisive about the background color as I changed it a lot before settling on a dark color. I also fiddled with the grass color for the base, but I didn't end up keeping it. To make a distinct material for the pot and pan, I just select the pot, then go to the Material tab, and select the body toon shader from the drop-down menu. Then, I make a unique duplicate by hitting this button right here. I can edit this unique duplicate without affecting the original. So I'll make my pot and pan a bit darker. I'll use this duplication process for each new toon-shaded material. Process is identical for the joints, the bacon, and the onions. And here you can see I changed the background again. Using all of the same processes we've covered, I just made some tweaks to the colors and the pose. But now I want to add an outline to my robot. For that, we need grease pencil. But first, for this to work, I'll want to make sure that all of my meshes for my robot are all in one collection. That way I can use Grease Pencil's Line Art Modifier to make my outlines automatically. So I'll select all of my pieces, hit M, and create a new collection and call it "meshes". Then, I'll add a new Grease Pencil object by hitting Shift+A, going to Grease Pencil, and selecting Blank. Next, I'll go to the Modifiers tab, and choose Line Art. I'll set the collection to meshes, because it houses all of my robot's pieces. Set the layer to GP_Layer, and set the material to black, which is the default. I'll adjust the line thickness to my liking. It's important to note here that the Line Art Modifier draws its outline based on the view from the camera. Okay, I changed the background color again. (lol) So don't be surprised if it looks funky in the normal 3D viewport. You'll notice me constantly referencing my camera from here onward. Now I want to start drawing on the robot itself, and to do that, I'll need to add another blank Grease Pencil object. If you want a complete tutorial on how to use Grease Pencil, you can check out this video right here. It covers everything you need to know. With my new Grease Pencil object selected, I'll go into draw mode and set the stroke placement to surface. You'll almost always need to adjust the offset when using surface for your stroke placement, and it's a bit fiddly, so make a little test mark and see where the stroke ends up. A little bit of tweaking later and you'll be good to go. By default, Grease Pencil strokes are set to 60% opaque, so if you want a solid black line, just go up to the Strength setting here and slide it to 1. I'm adjusting the offset until it looks right. Then I'll go into the Object Data Properties tab, which contains the layer information for my Grease Pencil object, and rename my first layer to Eyes. Then I'll go to the Materials tab and add a new material and make it an off-white fill for the eyes. I'll use this same process for each different material moving forward. And because my stroke placement is set to Surface, I can draw anywhere on my robot, as long as the stroke is touching what I'm drawing on, like with this bacon. I want the inside of this pot to have a soup-like substance in it, so I'll go into Edit Mode, select the top face of the soup, and then duplicate the toon shader, tweak the colors, and click Assign. Now I have soup! I'll tweak a little bit more and add some dots in a different color so that it looks like bubbles. Now I want to add some interesting details in 3D, starting with some steam. I'll switch the stroke placement to 3D Cursor, then hit Shift and right-click on the pan with the bacon to position the 3D cursor there. Next, I'll create a new blue-white material for the steam and start drawing on the pan before deciding on what to steam coming from the soup. I'm also using the Stabilize Stroke option in the Stroke menu for a nice smooth line. One of the benefits of Grease Pencil is that it's based on geometry, so you can hop into Edit Mode, then select and scale different parts of strokes, like I'm doing here with the steam. You can hit Alt+S to scale vertices. If the change isn't smooth enough, you can select the entire stroke by hovering over it and clicking L... then right-clicking and choosing Subdivide. Then you'll get a nice gradual change in scale. You can also adjust the proportional editing falloff with this menu if you want to try something different. Using Surface or 3D cursor placements, I'll draw in details. I'll add materials for different colors as needed and flesh out my angry little chef. I'll also add some tiny spheres to look like popping oil above the bacon, toss in some floor tiles so it seems vaguely like a kitchen, and add some grease to the bacon pan. I spent the next little while just tweaking colors, really, so I'll spare you the endless back and forth. And here's the final result! After some simple modeling and material creation, we have a cute, angry little robot chef. If you found this video helpful, I think you know what to do. If you'd like to support me further, head over to my Patreon, where you'll get access to the real time footage of this video, as well as the .blend file. All my love goes to my Patrons, without whom I could not make these videos, and special thanks to the Deuces Club, who always stick around to the end of my videos. If you weren't in the Deuces Club, you are now. If you want to join the Deuces Club members list, just comment "Deuces" down below. And feel free to come hang out on Discord, link is in the description. Alright everyone, I'll be back soon with another video. Deuces!
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Channel: Moltenbolt
Views: 62,530
Rating: undefined out of 5
Keywords: blender, blender tutorial, blender tutorial for beginners, blender beginner tutorial, blender texture paint, texture paint, beginner tutorial, blender 3d, hand painting textures, quick edit, blender tip, blender tips, blender trick, belnder tricks, blender tips and tricks, blender quick edit, blender texture painting, blender texture painting tip, blender texture painting trick, blender texture painting tips and tricks, photoshop, krita, clip studio paint
Id: T2c4foJj6nQ
Channel Id: undefined
Length: 13min 54sec (834 seconds)
Published: Mon Mar 18 2024
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