Small Blender Freestyle Test

[Tosek]

Hi Folks,

I did a small test render for a very simple, early character potrait in blender. I used the new freestyle cartoon renderer. With some minor tweaks I think this is useful for adventure gfx.

[Renal Shutdown]

As a model/shader, I'd say it looks fairly generic and the colors look somewhat muddy.  (Except the eyes, which seem to bright).

I understand that it's just a test render, but I'd suggest putting more work into it, before porting it to AGS.  That way, you'll have a better idea of how it could be used.  The test render might end up putting you off the idea, if it looks rather hinky the first time around.  Dependent on resolution, you might also want to hoof up the line size on them a bit, too.

I can see it being very handy as a template to paintover, though.

EDIT:

Lighting from that angle may be bothersome, too.  Perhaps a combination of Emission, Subsurface Scattering, and er.. Ambient Occlusion might be a better option?

[Problem]

Not bad, at least as a template to start from. It depends on what you want to do with those rendered graphics. Right now there's not much detail, but if you want to scale the characters down and use them at a lower resolution (for walkcycles etc.), this could work very well. But for a close-up portrait it doesn't look detailed enough and lacks "personality".

[Ali]

I'm using the new implementation of Freestyle in Blender for characters in Nelly Cootalot 2. Freestyle implementation is very promising, but there are lots of obstacles making it hard to get images looking the way you want. Here are a couple of suggestions/observations:

The Toon Shader - Increase the emit value to around 0.5, then lower the intensity of the diffuse colour until the skin is the right colour where the light is hitting it. That will get rid of the black shading on his jaw. I'd suggest setting the specular intensity to 0, because toon specular shading isn't good for skin.

Intersecting Poly Problem - There is an inconsistent freestyle line around his eyes and hairline because the geometry is intersecting and (at the moment) intersections don't generate freestyle lines. I've found it takes a lot of tweaking the mesh to get lines working around eyes and hair.

[Tosek]

Thanx for the hints Ali. This was really the first test to check out how things would like like and if this is an alternative to hand drawn graphics. It will surely help a lot when it comes to animations.

BTW Ali: Can you give me some hints how to set up rendering to get transparent sprites (transparent background) with the exact size I need for my animation frames (whatever size it is)?

[Ali]

You can do that from the Render Settings (the camera icon on the left of the buttons panel). Under the Dimensions tab, type your frame size in as Resolution (remember to set the scale at 100% when doing this). Under Shading set Sky to Transparent. Then under Output choose PNG and RGBA.

Then you'll be able to export PNGs with transparent backgrounds at the correct frame size.

[Tosek]

Thanx Ali, works fine.
And - if you would be so kind ;-) - could you give me some hints about lighting setup?

[Ali]

Sorry Tosek, that's where the simple technical fixes end and it becomes a question of aesthetics. The lighting is very flat for my game, but if you were using toon shading for a dark, graphic-novel look then you'd use completely different lighting setups.

All I can suggest is watching a lot of lighting tutorials for blender and looking at a lot of reference images. Toon shading is practically different from traditional shading, and there aren't many great tutorials, so beyond that it's just experimentation. Hope that helps!

[Construed]

I Was trying to help come up with a logo for AGSarchives dev section about a week ago and came up with these results:
Originally:


Different settings through the renderer: