International deviance

This is a cartoon I made as a fan video for Disasteradio, a local artist. I really like his stuff, and see him play as often as I can. Its a track from one of his albums, the story is really strong, and the video pretty much wrote itself.
Anyway, its here.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c9LXeGg0BnA
Basically, the video was made in blender. The shapes are planes and bezier circles with an unshaded material on them. The shapes are kind of like cut-outs, the movement is all in the X and Y planes.

Oyster - way cool blender materials

Get it from here:
http://blender.blogchina.com/inc/tut-pencil.rar

it looks like this uses an animated material which deforms the mesh, in order to make multiple lines. Its really cool.

Update:
I've had a look at this, and its a combination of a bunch of stuff. There is a material with an IPO, which is basically randomised. This affects the scale of the object (size xyz and displace IPO's) This is also set to affect the normal and displace in the texture. It then uses a motion blur to run through the material IPO, which displaces the mesh and makes the outside lines. The charcoal effect is a cleer texture which looks pretty average on its own, but when blurred looks a lot like charcoal. It may be possible to texture it so it looks like crayon or brush strokes, but I'm not sure yet. I imagine each blur frame could be textured in that way somehow, but I'm not sure.

x-ray materials

Sonix did some really nice x-ray materials, however I can't find the link any more! its a 404 :( http://www.free-webspace.biz/sonix/Cars/Blender234CarMaterialLibraryR1.html
This is the blendernation post:
http://www.blendernation.com/2006/05/11/car-material-library/

Here is a link to a blender materials repository.
http://www.blender-materials.org/index.php

It would be really cool if there was a comp nodes/npr shader equivalent. It would also be better if comp nodes could be saved in full, ie the input and output nodes. Oh well....

Techniques and papers

http://graphics.uni-konstanz.de/forschung/npr.php some interesting stuff here to look at, I just had a brieff glance at the "etching" section, which looks easy and do-able.

somthing i found on google, a font of possible ideas to try:
http://209.85.173.104/search?q=cache:1vXETCMO1CUJ:www.cs.virginia.edu/~gfx/Courses/2004/RealTime/lecture12.NPR1.ppt+non+photorealistic+shader&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=12&gl=nz&client=firefox-a

interesting techniques to try:
http://marctenbosch.com/projects_npr_shading.html

Pynodes

Blender pynodes look interesting. More information here:
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/BlenderDev/PyNodes/API
and here:
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/BlenderDev/PyNodes

ekakiya - illustration style render test

This looks awesome! I can't wait to have a go with it myself, I've been trying to do halftones for a while. I don't think Blender will do nice blended halftones, but oh well. It comes with comments as well!
http://blenderartists.org/forumshowthread.php?t=83298&highlight=sketch+shader

NPR texture tutorials

Blender:

Nick Tower blender stuff - awesome! I've had a play with the techniques in these tutorials, and they are awesome! It comes out really well.
http://pages.zoom.co.uk/nick.towers/tutorials/toon_shading_tutorial/toon_shading_tutorial.html

I couldn't get this to work (no reflection on the tutorial, I certainly plan to have another go) it uses textures for the effects.
http://matthieu3d.free.fr/TutoVira2/tut2en.html

A tutorial on anime-like textures for Blender. Its really good too, I've used them a couple of times.
http://mywebpage.netscape.com/ottoana/ANIME_TUT/TUTORIAL.html

There are probably more out there (specifically for Blender), I'll just have a look out for them.

other:
3d studio anime/manga character
http://www.3dtotal.com/ffa/tutorials/maya/non_photo_realistic_shading/realistic_shading.asp

shaders for Maya.
http://www.arcsecond.net/walkthroughs/nprTut.html

External renderers for blender

Here is a list of free renderers which are compatible with Blender.

http://www.toxicengine.org/ - "toxic is a physically correct global illumination renderer" its for photrealistic rendering. but still, handy to know about.

http://www.aqsis.org/xoops/modules/news/ - A renderman compliant renderer.
I've downloaded this, I will play with NPR shaders with it sometime.

http://sunflow.sourceforge.net/ - another photrealistic renderer, this time in Java.

http://www.pointzero.nl/renderers/ - a list of renderers, I think it has ones for Blender on it as well.

http://shell.studenti.unina.it/~ospite/vrm/section/en/about.html - more of a plugin for Blender, I think. Its a vector graphic renderer.

Yafray (www.yafray.org) is a realistic rendering engine for Blender as well.

a free addon for Blender is: http://www3.sympatico.ca/emilio.aguirre/s2flender.html flender, a blender to flash (swf) converter. Latest version is 2.6, I used an older version, and it was pretty sweet.

blend 2 sketch, a pretty awesome looking converter which exports to Sketch (vector images) http://www.fauskes.net/code/blend2sketch/
Sketch manual:
http://www.frontiernet.net/~eugene.ressler/manual.html

Comics style rendering engine thing. This generates images with really hard blacks, which look like they come out of an old school comic book (like 2000 AD or something). Its quite nice looking, but a hard style to get right.
http://inkulator.sourceforge.net/index.php

Blender specific edge/npr rendering

Blender specific things, there are no doubt a couple I've missed, and a few I've blogged about before (pantograph, freestyle)

a free addon for Blender is: http://www3.sympatico.ca/emilio.aguirre/s2flender.html flender, a blender to flash (swf) converter. Latest version is 2.6, I used an older version, and it was pretty sweet.

blend 2 sketch, a pretty awseome looking converter which exports to Sketch http://www.fauskes.net/code/blend2sketch/
Sketch manual:
http://www.frontiernet.net/~eugene.ressler/manual.html

Comics style rendering engine thing. This generates images with really hard blacks, which look like they come out of an oldschool comic book. Its quite nice looking, but a hard style to get right.
http://inkulator.sourceforge.net/index.php

there was an older one, called SLiM, waaaay back. but i cant find it.

Edit:
I found it! here: http://www.geocities.com/pollythesheep/SLiM.zip wooo!

SliM thread
http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=14088

Renderman things

Renderman uses shaders to do stuff, and there are quite a few shaders out there if you look. There are also some free renderman compliant renderers out there too. renderman isn't a renderer, as such, its a shader description language.

http://area.autodesk.com/index.php/downloads_shaders/shaders_list/

http://txspace.tamu.edu/handle/1969.1/1125

the site is orange! they might be GLSL shaders.
http://www.3dshaders.com/home/

a google book, more to do with open GL shaders, but has some interesting NPR shaders
http://books.google.co.nz/books?id=eTU1SpAdH98C&pg=PA81&lpg=PA81&dq=non+photorealistic+shader&source=web&ots=2A0ifAmIsT&sig=ctjN9sWhh7F1ld6Hn6-RIb94eFo&hl=en#PPR12,M1

maya toon shader.
http://www.vrvis.at/vr/cgr4/cartoonshader/index.html

"Advanced Renderman: Creating CGI for Motion Pictures" has npr in it

http://www.ideepix.nl/work/recent.php?what=NonPhoto has a mention of techniques from this book, I wonder if my local university has it, or how much it is on Amazon....


EDIT:

www.renderman.org has shaders on it, I found this ages ago.]

BtoR is a blender to Rib (renderman) exporter.
http://www.stormwind-studios.com/metadot/index.pl?id=2015

Renderman compliant renderers (non-free, i'llpost some free ones later)
http://www.3delight.com/en/ - 3delight
http://www.sitexgraphics.com/html/air.html - Air
https://renderman.pixar.com/products/tools/renderman.html - Renderman/PRman/somethinglikethat...

Newsgroup Renderman FAQ
http://objectmix.com/graphics/147231-renderman-faq-monthly-posting.html

Non-free NPR renderers

I'm upgrading to kubuntu hoary from a gusty backup due to trying to get my phone to pair with my computer (don't ask, I have no idea what happened), which will take a while. I want to do an update once a week, at least, so this week I'm doing a brief roundup of non-free NPR renderers. These are just ones I've found on my travels around the internet, its by no means an exhaustive list. I don't have any interest in them really, other than trying to mimic the techniques.

First off, we have Illustrate! its for 3d studio. find it here It looks pretty. Apparently Aardman's Chicken-Run used it for previz, and Production IG use it for Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone complex. Nice!

Jot is't exactly non-free, but you have to email them to get it. The web link is broken though, otherwise I'd have a bit of a play and some screenshots.

The reyes plugins have been around for a while, and they make a toon one, as well as a bunch of other plugins for 3ds max, for clothing etc.... http://www.reyes-infografica.com/

http://www.penguin3d.com/

not sure it does NPR, but probably not.
http://www.yafray.org/

Piranesi is a really nice watercolour renderer, it looks like stuff an architect would do.
http://www.informatix.co.uk/piranesi/gallery.shtml

This is a huge page of NPR links. Its pretty old though, and some of the links are dead :( Quite a bit of it seems to be algorhythms and such. http://www.red3d.com/cwr/npr/

oooh, http://portal.acm.org/toc.cfm?id=1274871&idx=SERIES963&type=proceeding&coll=Portal&dl=ACM&part=series&WantType=Proceedings&title=NPAR&CFID=27847381&CFTOKEN=89643736
"Proceedings of the 5th international symposium on Non-photorealistic animation and rendering", which includes such things as Team Fortress!

glsl shaders are in gameblender, not sure how to get them in a blender animation though.
http://www.bonzaisoftware.com/npr.html

according to this article, Poser has some NPR stuff in it. hurrah!
http://images.google.co.nz/imgres?imgurl=http://www.bellaonline.us/~digitalart/efrontier/Poser7/SketchOfMan.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.bellaonline.com/articles/art52951.asp&h=296&w=439&sz=19&hl=en&start=581&sig2=MOJukFwDLYB8XpJWFzGx-Q&um=1&tbnid=O1nkqWkiudcOBM:&tbnh=86&tbnw=127&ei=9sAqSKyLPKCKpwSGwLSzBA&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dnon%2Bphotorealistic%2Brender%26start%3D576%26ndsp%3D18%26um%3D1%26hl%3Den%26client%3Dfirefox-a%26rls%3Dcom.ubuntu:en-US:official%26sa%3DN

finaltoon looks freakin sweet! check out the gallery, this is a page with some examples of line types.
http://cebas.com/products/feature.php?FID=306&PID=37&UD=10-7888-31-788

http://www.gdi.com.cn/product_detail.asp?BigClassName=SketchUp6.0(G)%D4%F6%D6%B5%B0%E6

http://algorithmicarts.com/gallery/ Made for maya, examples of the EVA renderer and the Expressive Effects plugins for Maya.

virtualbox + w2k + freestyle = argh!

I'm not too bad at computers, but I can't get virtualbox to recognise my win2k install disk at all. Though the floppy images work OK. I'l probably end up installing it on a spare hard drive and then imaging it off that, sigh.
In trying to install virtualbox the first time, I nuked my groups, bar virtualbox, so I had no sudo, cdrom access, nothing. Lucky I had a backup of my partition, so I restored from that. The update to Hardy barfed anyway, because I ran out of room (on a nearly 4 gig partition! sheesh!)

Anyway, this blog is supposed to be about Non-Photorealistic Rendering, so here is another dissection of a load of noodles I found on www.blenderartist.org in the forums.


Anyway, from top to bottom, the first node is for the background, the second (yellow) is for the colour of the sun, the next one along (the circle) is what the yellow is added to for the main bit of the sun , the face below that is the sun's features again , it gets added to the other sun bit (white with rays) which is coloured by the yellow. The red is added on top for some more colour, and then the part below is what is used to texture the yellow bits and the red bits, as well as the background a bit. The ramps are used to block certain bits of the texture from the mask, they are then passed through those parts and then composited together. This means you only need one texture to modify the whole lot.
I've tried making this myself, but it didn't turn out quite as good as this one is. I'm not sure if the pictures (any of them? all of them? none of them?) have an alpha channel which I'd missed out. Oh well. I get the main gist and could probably make my own if I wanted to. All in all, its a pretty clever idea :)
Sadly, I can't remember who made this, I'll have to hunt it up.


Edit:
I've got Freestyle to run on Virtual obx, in a win2k environment. It was mostly me being stupid (it needed the floppy images to install, plus you need to install the host extensions into the virtual machine, from the website). That aside, it keeps on crashing when I try to render it. Oh well, I'll have to wait, or get an older version which perhaps will work better.