#npr3d — Public Fediverse posts

We built Lunatics around the Blender Internal renderer, which was removed along with the game engine when they went to v2.8. Switching rendering engines would be too big an ask, so we just stuck with 2.79 (for now).

There IS a fork of the program, called "UPBGE" that incorporates both BI and the Game Engine (also removed with 2.8).

Later Blender includes the "Eevee" renderer, which I understand was based on the previous "viewport renderer" (that's also when "annotations" became separate from "grease pencil").

And the "Cycles" renderer, which is meant to be more photorealistic was retained.

But they junked "Blender Internal". I understand it had a lot of "technical debt". And the Blender Game Engine I think was considered to be out of scope and not competitive with other game engines, so they dropped that.

There are also 3rd party renderers. I haven't tried them, myself, but I hear good things about them from time to time.

One of particular interest to me is "BEER" the "Blender Extended Expressive Renderer" which is explicitly designed for NPR3D work, and it's successor (I think), called "Malt".

I might give those a go before long. Maybe next year.

It occurs to me to wonder if UPBGE or some other package of BI can be used for rendering from later versions of Blender? 🤔

UPBGE:
https://upbge.org

BNPR - BEER & MALT:
https://github.com/bnpr

#Blender3D #NPR3D

Hiromi Lerner was a musician and a medical student. Now she's a paramedic and a nutritionist for a Moon Colony.

And a Mom, as we see in the pilot episode of "Lunatics!"

Re-rendered to (I hope) loop properly, and with simple text wartermark.

#LunaticsProject #OpenMovie #Blender3D #NPR3D

lunatics.tv

Well, I've got a draft. It's somewhere between a storybook, a comic, and a coloring book.

There are line-drawings, which are rendered with Blender Freestyle. Illustrating the story, alongside a very simplified text narrative, with a few line quotations.

Total length is 44 pages (22 sheets, front and back). Letter-size in landscape orientation.

Here's a preview from the PDF, with 4 page (2 2-page spreads) shown. I laid a lot of it out to take advantage of facing pages. #Blender3D #FreeStyle #NPR3D #LineArt #art # #ColoringBook

One thing I do wonder about is when I would hit a practical limit.

With Scribus, when I was using it in 2009, it really couldn't handle projects above about 30 pages. The computer would become unreasonably slow, and the latency would destroy any productivity.

So when I typeset my book then, I actually did it one chapter at a time, and then zipped the chapters together with command line PDF tools to create the PDF I sent to the printer (which was Lulu).

Of course, I imagine things have improved in the last 14 years, but I haven't actually checked.

I wonder if Inkscape will run into some kind of wall like that?

I do see that exporting to PDF is getting fairly slow at 40 pages, but not to the point where it's a problem. #Blender3D #FreeStyle #NPR3D #LineArt #art # #ColoringBook

I think this would be a pretty good way to make a graphic novel.

Panels should be particularly easy to set up in Inkscape, and with clipping boundaries and layering, you can do overlapping, full-bleed, and other stylistic options easily (provided your printer can handle it, of course).

Printing companies will often ask for cutting marks to do full-blled artwork (that is, the PDF pages you submit are oversize, with marks to indicate where the paper should be trimmed). #Blender3D #FreeStyle #NPR3D #LineArt #art # #ColoringBook

This is certainly the largest book I've laid out in Inkscape, using the new multipage features introduced into recent versions by @[email protected] . Currently at 40 pages!

I have to say that it is working very well on a technical level.

I do think a cool option might be to lay these out in more of a grid than in a single long line of pages, to make better use of the canvas space when zoomed out to get an overview of the project.

Also, I haven't found a really good way to set up guides that apply to every page, for setting consistent margins. I tried just using a grid sized to match the pages, but I'd have to include the gutter space between pages to make it stay aligned. Not sure where I can even find what that size is.

In Scribus, you can set up a prototype page that is a base for each new page, and if you put margins and guides on that page, they show up everywhere. Maybe something similar would be good in Inkscape?

It's going to work nicely for this project, though. I'm almost done. Probably won't be over 48 pages when finished.
#Blender3D #FreeStyle #NPR3D #LineArt #art # #ColoringBook

Well, I think this may actually work.

I guess this was destined to happen, since I had nice shots of Gerogiana coloring already. #Blender3D #FreeStyle #NPR3D #LineArt #art

Of course, I could retouch them all, and probably will if I use them for a bigger publication project. But for this one, time/effort constraints mean either no retouching or drop the project. ​:ani_dunno:​ #Blender3D #FreeStyle #NPR3D #LineArt #art

I'm going to a little zine fair at the end of the month with my daughter, so I had this idea that I might create a "coloring book" with ink-only renders from the Lunatics episode.

I've always thought these looked cool, but I have to admit that, as stand-alone, unedited line art, they are a bit minimal. Not every line gets marked -- there's some stuff that relies on the "Paint" layer to work.

It definitely evokes the picture, but there's a lot of lines missing you'd normally draw as an ink artist.

Not sure how well this is going to work, but I guess we'll see... #Blender3D #FreeStyle #NPR3D #LineArt #art

Ugh! Some days are just hard.

I've been trying to focus on refactoring a dramatic scene, which involves untangling a lot of linked objects, and I just hate focusing on it. ADHD and animation are a toxic combination, I think.

I'm on day 3 of this 1-day project... ​:welp:​ #Blender3D # #NPR3D

@[email protected]
Maybe I mean a little better than muppet-mouth.

I'll be trying to simply open/close the mouth for vowel/consonants. Basically a two-phoneme system, which is what you get with a puppet. I am just going to try to locate the frame numbers for the main vowels and work with that.

We did have a more sophisticated workflow which was used on the press conference scene, but there has been bitrot; no time for troubleshooting; and only a few "pick up" shots to finish.

Also, as in this shot, the mouth isn't clearly visible, because of the bottom of the visor, so I think this will be good enough to sell it. #Blender3D # #NPR3D

FWIW, I also had to do some layer-fiddling to get the "Thru-Ink" working. Now I just have to worry about lip-sync, though I think this one's just going to be a little "muppet-mouth", rather than real sync.
#Blender3D # #NPR3D

Ah. The specularity layer wasn't added. Easily remedied.

Sadly, this likely means that it's missing from MANY of my shots. It was just more obvious here.

#Blender3D # #NPR3D

Okay. Well, it's progress. This no longer crashes Blender when I render it. I think it was still the problem with the set, though I had it linked very strangely.

I still need to add some lip-sync animation.

Something a little weird going on with what should be a specular bright spot on the helmet. I bet that's more shadow layer problems. #Blender3D # #NPR3D

This shot was easy to fix -- I just added a transparent lens to the LED display. Without it, the characters were all wiped out by Freestyle outlines!

I fudged for the NY2025 release, by just using the GL, but now I have a correct render.
#Blender3D #Freestyle #NPR3D

Okay, I think I'm getting somewhere now.

Really didn't realize how hard the lighting was going to be on this shot!

In the end, I gave up on "realistic" light coming in the window, and just put the spotlight INSIDE the porthole. Less physically accurate, but it works better -- no weird shadow-layer stuff.

Also, realized that since I added "Emit" to all the toon materials to give them a basic dark color, I need to tone that down in the composite a bit to get the light contrast I was after.

#Blender3D #BlenderInternal #Lighting #NPR3D

I have now purchased the add-on “Deep Paint Pro” from GAKU, because I've always liked this NPR look and because I like to draw anyway and can combine it with 3D, even better. To familiarize myself with the add-on, I created my own lantern using the tutorial. From what I have seen and learned so far, there are a whole range of new possibilities opening up. I am excited to see where this journey will take me.

#b3d #blender #3dart #3d #npr3d

Oh, BTW -- Blender 2.79 lies about the peak RAM usage on these renders in the stamp labels. That only considers the paint render RAM.

I've been using the System Monitor to check total RAM. The other benchmark method I use is the GNU "time" utility (has to be the GNU project version). With its verbose setting, you can get a report on the total peak RAM used by the process, and that's what we need to consider for planning how many processes we can use.

Once you figure that out, you can set Blender to render every N number of frames starting from a given frame, using command line flags. Then you just setup N process, each one starting one frame later than the previous, so they fill in all the frames.

Very low-tech and hands-on, but it does work!

Someday, I'll probably use some render farm automation for that, but this is the way I've been doing these. #LunaticsProject #Animation #Render #Blender3D #NPR3D

Oh, and important point, since this was the goal: this now takes 13 minutes to render, and less that 12 GB of RAM.

These render times are dominated by the Freestyle computation (about 2 minutes is for the paint render). Without this fix, the render time was running past 35 minutes, and starting to use swap space on my workstation (32 GB RAM).

Freestyle is single-threaded, so it runs on one CPU.

When I render this on the server, it'll be parallalized by rendering multiple frames in parallel, with 20 CPU cores and 128 GB RAM.

Typically these are limited by the RAM, rather than the CPUs, so in this case, I'll be able to use about 10 rendering processes in parallel, so that'll give me a 10X speedup to an average of 1.3 minutes per frame.

900 frames x 1.3 = 1170 minutes = 19.5 hrs to render the shot. That's heavy for me, but acceptable.

(I'm fudging to assume all frames take the same time, which they don't -- it's a very dynamic shot, and the geometry affects the render time a lot).

This other test frame is now only 8 minutes -- which is an even stronger speedup. The entire train and track is hiding behind that last car, but I've got the ink camera range animated so Freestyle is only considering the final car. #LunaticsProject #Animation #Render #Blender3D #NPR3D

OKAY. Here is the result after splitting the scene to create a range-limited ink-camera, composited with the separate paint-camera.

Recapping the method:
This uses the node-based compositor to assemble the "ink" and "paint" elements rendered from the same model.

Normally I do this all in one scene, using the same camera, which is definitely easier.

However, sometimes there are serious (computer-crashing) performance problems with a "vanishing point" shot like this, because the geometry that Freestyle has to consider for computing ink lines gets all bunched up near the vanishing point.

This wastes tons of resources calculating edge visibility for edges that are so tiny they wouldn't matter to the result, anyway.

But I can get Blender to exclude those by reducing the max range limit on the camera. However, I don't want to limit the range for the "paint" render.

So, I create a fully linked scene, then split the camera ("make single user"), rename it to "Cam-Ink" and set the range limit on that. It follows the paint camera exactly in all other ways, so the ink lines neatly match the paint.

This is sweetened a little by also using a "distance-from-camera" thickness modifier on the ink to taper the ink lines off into the distance, so there isn't such an abrupt cutoff. #LunaticsProject #Animation #Render #Blender3D #NPR3D

(I am NOT actually asking for help to solve this, and I haven''t given enough information in any case. I'm sure I'll manage. This is just to give you a peek at what I'm working on).

However, if anyone feels a desire to chime in with an explanation of why the Blender Internal "Shadow" pass generates intense colors like this red, that might be helpful. I have never understood what's going on with that!

Also, this clearly shows that the shadow pass is the culprit. It seems to be because these are "shadeless" objects. But it's not what I would expect it to do. I would expect those areas to have no shadow, or possible for the alpha layer from the shadow pass to mark them as 'transparent' so that it would have no effect.

But if I break out the alpha from the shadow layer, it's all 100% opaque. So IDK. 🤔 #Blender #Compositing #InkPaint #NPR3D #LunaticsProject

I just rendered a better example. And I have some breakdown for it.

The first image is the "pre-composite" -- that's a PNG image that I spit out of the rendering process to give a quick look at the way things are going, using the default ink+paint compositing.

The 2nd image is the "base color" image. This has some of the render passes (shadow, in particuler) missing, because they are stored in separate layers in the output EXR image.

The 3rd image is the base "ink" image, against a white background for clarity (the ink layer is actually transparent). There is some compositing magic that removes the ink lines for stuff that should be "behind" the billboard characters.

The "real" output from my renders is a "Multilayer EXR stream" -- that is, a long series of numbered EXR image files. This format can store multiple image layers that can then be tweaked and assembled during the compositing phase.

What I normally have been sharing are the "pre-composite" PNG images, which are really just a preview I generate during rendering, using a default compositing setup.

#Blender #Compositing #InkPaint #NPR3D #LunaticsProject

#Inktober has me thinking about the aesthetics of ink, and how I've used #Blender to create "ink" art for #NPR3D effects in #LunaticsProject.

I did a pretty solid benchmark comparison between results from #EdgeNode (a compositing-stage solution) and #Freestyle (geometry based) in 2018:

https://lunaticsproject.org/2019/01/01/december-2018-summary/

Those were (and are) what's available to me in Blender 2.79. With the later Blender release came upgrades to #GreasePencil which can be used to some degree, and the apparently very popular #LineArt system, which I really haven't tried properly yet.

I lost some intermediate data awhile back, so I'm having to re-render some shots to get started on my next sequence, before I can finish more improvements, but it's getting closer.

Some more work-in-progress test renders.

#LunaticsProject #OpenMovie #Blender #NPR3D #InkPaint

Although there is still animation and rendering to do, I am starting to think about my compositing pipeline.

Our basic look design is based on "ink" (rendered by Blender-Freestyle) over "paint" (rendered by the Blender Internal "Toon" Renderer), simulating the appearance of celluloid animation.

The Blender Internal renderer is why we're still using Blender 2.79. This will probably be replaced by Eevee in later episodes, once we've worked out a good appearance.

These will be put together, but both processes are subject to some errors that I would like to clean up -- ideally being able to work on ink and paint layers separately.

And there's also the possibility of adding some 2D flare to certain shots. For example, it should be possible to put an "antique" effect on the paint layer, or simply fade it, for effect. This could even be done with a mask to create a "vignette" look. Or we could alter the color of the ink layer (perhaps to improve contrast with dark shots, etc).

These will likely be done with a combination of traveling-matte masks created with Blender's "Movie Clip Editor" and drawn-on animation with "Grease Pencil".

I don't know much about Grease Pencil... yet. So that's on my agenda for this month.

https://tv.filmfreedom.net/w/eNw5Nq6qEFpHtUk8SboHBF
#LunaticsProject #OpenMovie #Blender #NPR3D #InkPaint

The still for my banner image comes from one of my favorite shots in the pilot, with a lot of different elements coming together.

I did the "decals" and texturing on these models, while the mech models you see here (Soyuz, launch pad, transporter-erector, and support train, as well as the lighting and camera towers) were all modeled by Chris Kuhn, based on drawings and reference photographs I collected for him. I did a LOT of research to try to get the appearance right on these shots.

The "background set model" here is by me: the background buildings, paved areas, landscape, and texturing. I also created the "sky rig" which allows me to move the Sun and Moon, control the clouds, and so on. This is even more important in some later shots, where I simulated timelapse shots.

There are two kinds of characters in this shot. The man in the foreground is a fully-animated "extra" character, modeled and rigged by Keneisha Perry, based on earlier models by Bela Szabo, character design drawings by Daniel Fu (which set the general style for the show, as well as specifically designing the main characters), and finally, some reference photos I found for technicians and ground crew at Baikonur Cosmodrome (for wardrobe).

Some of the characters in the distance, though are pre-posed characters which have been converted to billboards (flat images, rigged to point at the camera), which I call "billboard extras". These were invaluable for creating the impression of larger numbers of people, which was a challenge on this pilot episode, since it starts out on Earth.

Credit:
#LunaticsProject | https://lunatics.tv
CC By-SA 4.0

#MastoArt #Blender3D #NPR3D #OpenMovie #Animation

Soyuz on the pad, just after sunrise.

Because launch vehicles tend to launch towards the East to take advantage of the Earth's rotation, the Gagarin-Start pad in Kazakhstan does 'face' eastwards, with the support equipment on the west side, which makes this shot work out nicely.

From "Lunatics!" ep.1 "No Children in Space".

#LunaticsProject | https://lunatics.tv
CC By-SA 4.0

#MastoArt #OpenMovie #Animation #CreativeCommons #Blender3D #NPR3D

Another set based on a real location. This is the outside of the "Building 254" at Baikonur Cosmodrome. Views from this area can be see in a number of RosCosmos and NASA videos from the 2000s-2010s.

I wanted to sprinkle stuff like this in, so that it almost feels like one of those videos.

#LunaticsProject
:cc_cc: :cc_by: :cc_sa: 4.0

#OpenMovie #Space #NPR3D #Blender3D

My impression of Baikonur, Kazakhstan, from my research is that it's a weird little town in the middle of the (semi-)desert with lots of old tenement housing and monuments. Obviously had to include a few of the more memorable ones in the tour.

#LunaticsProject | https://lunatics.tv
:cc_cc: :cc_by: :cc_sa: 4.0

#MastoArt #CreativeToots #Space #Blender3D #NPR3D

The Sun rises behind the launchpad as the Soyuz launch vehicle is being erected on it. Since the launchpad is oriented towards due-East in order to get maximum advantage from the Earth's rotation, it occurred to me that it would be possible to line up the shot so that the Sun was behind the pad, and with a "telephoto" perspective, the Sun would loom large behind it.

It was one of those ideas I had late in the process, when I was setting up the shots, but I think it fits in very nicely as a thematic element, and it's a very pretty shot.

Of course, the shot is also a simulated "timelapse", so the sky actively changes during the shot. So I was able to apply both my astronomy knowledge and Blender armature rigging knowledge to this problem.

Art by...
Terry Hancock (research, plans views, materials, textures, lighting, sky rig, set topography)

Chris Kuhn (mech models: Soyuz rocket, gantry, transporter-erector vehicle, train cars)

Keneisha Perry (pad crew character models and rigging)


Lunatics Project | https://lunatics.tv
CC By-SA 4.0
#LunaticsProject #OpenMovie #Blender3D #NPR3D #Soyuz #Space #OpenMovie #Blender3D #NPR3D #Soyuz #Space #MastoArt