Original subtitles

Hey hey, Gleb here! let's talk about simplification a super important part of this stylization process.

simplification often means throwing out the unimportant traits and properties of an object or

scene and leaving only the essential bits that are most expressive in regards to your artistic vision

of this thing or scene or object. our plan for this video would be to take this already simplified car

model by Manu Järvinen (feel free to download it from project files) and we will keep reducing it to its

basic states even more. we will take it through a few stages of simplification by throwing away

the unimportant elements like perspective or lighting, who cares about them anyway and we will

talk about the theoretical side of simplification as well because that's one of the main two

operations of stylization alongside exaggeration obviously. so let's start the ball rolling.

we humans are really great at recognizing objects based on just a few key properties,

just a couple of polygons in this model of a car, just a few objects representing various details,

just a few materials for that matter, three materials to be exact and solid blocks

of color, no textures whatsoever, no fine details and just a few hints of what makes this object

a car and yet we can read it perfectly fine and being more simple or even primitive, this car

didn't become less expressive, on the contrary, one can say, this became much more representative of

an idea of a car (and a very cute one! :) and just like with the other operations with style, we can

push it very far to this stylized side or to the abstract side and still keep it readable. how far

you want to take it, it's totally up to you, it's a constituent part of your artistic vision, of your

style, we can make it really really generalized but if you push it a little bit too hard

you will end up in an abstract thought land from the Inside Out Pixar movie, do you remember that? :)

four stages, the first one is... what was it... non-objective fragmentation, then reconstruction

and then hey, Bing Bong, we're two-dimensional! we're non-figurative!! that was hilarious :D

you'd better be careful... brave, but careful. so it's a fine line but anyway even in in the case of such

crazy artistic representation of the object we can still say that... well, it's my abstract vision and

we'll be perfectly fine with it. we can even throw away the shading information, that's

some next level of simplification and we will be left with only these solid blocks of color

and yet it will *still* be a car. yeah or we can drive the car *away from the frame* and it will

*still* be a car. it will it will be an absence of a car... okay i'm kidding :) but you got the point.

let's have a look now at the simplification styles starting at the Manu-style simplification,

the one that you can see on the left, going to the isometric low poly style and to the pixel art.

these are very distinct flavors of this the same operation which is simplifying stuff so it's kind

of interesting. all right the first thing that i would do is i switch the render engine to Eevee.

that will by itself reduce the shading complexity of the scene, we will make it less photorealistic

and that is by definition more stylized. second of all i will add the decimate modifier.

this modifier in some software is called Simplify so yeah. we can adjust the ratio

and it will reduce the overall number of polygons and it will crunch the model, make it a little bit

more abstract, a little bit more non-figurative you may say. all right and what else can we do? for

example we can change the lens from perspective to orthographic to collapse the overall complexity of

three-dimensional perspective to a two-dimensional representation of a three-dimensional perspective.

remember we're Bing Bong in the Abstract Thought land, kind of. we're losing the degrees

of freedom, so to speak, we're collapsing into more abstract shapes. all right so it already looks like

it's a low poly asset from a 2d game or at least we're on the way to this stage of simplification,

but we can do more. we can do way way more. let's jump over to the shader editor

make... make some room for additional nodes, go Shift A search and search for

Shader-to-Rgb node. we will talk about this node extensively later on in the course, because it's

super helpful to create a cartoonish looking shaders, which are *shadeless*... forgive me a pun.

but for now let's add the color ramp and place it just after the Shader-to-Rgb node, then i will

copy paste the base color from this shader to the stops of the color ramp by going Ctrl C and Ctrl V

and then i will control the colors directly by adjusting the color stops.

i will do the same for the background mesh which is a plane, but this time i will give it a sandy

color instead of a teal, so practically we have just got rid of the lighting information, how the

light interacts with the underlying materials of the object and now we're playing with solid colors.

that's yet another step towards generalization, but what else can we do? can we take it even further

than that? we need to go deeper, we need to go pixel art! that that will be a final destination of our

tutorial i guess, because further than that it's a realm of Kazimir Malevich and other impressionist

painters. it's pretty cool, but we won't go this road for now. alright so still we can tell that

even in this low poly isometric image we still have some things that make it... complex, like for

example gradients. that means some hint of shading. and then we have... god forbid... a soft light. soft

lights are impeccable for modeling big shapes for revealing uh the relationship between different

objects, for drawing some extra ambient occlusion so to speak, so let's get rid of it too. i'm going

to go to the shaders once again and crunch the stops of the color ramp to which the Shader-to-Rgb

node is hooked. the goal here would be to collapse the gradients that are still present in the image

and by doing that we we are deconstructing everything to just pure unadulterated colors

which is almost a two-dimensional art approach. the two-dimensional art sensibilities play a crucial

role in this process actually. for that matter we can even remove all shadows from the light sources

and make the light sources way way smaller to practically remove the gradations in shadows.

and just allow me to rotate the light source a little bit... i think it looks very nineties :) well

i think instead of removing all the shadows we can we can turn off the ambient occlusion instead.

so i'm going to go into the render settings uncheck ambient occlusion and other effects...

all right we're halfway there, the next thing that i will do is i will crunch down the resolution

to something like 100 pixels wide, that will give us our pixelated version of the image,

now let's just hit f12 to render it out and it's a little bit soft, what's going on?

the softness though is caused by the anti-aliasing filter, let's take it down from 1.5 to just 0.01,

practically to zero, to totally remove the aliasing and get our sweet pixels. that was easy!

but it works only because we have set up such shader that... that is already simplified to the

extent that it only shows pure colors and other such stuff, so we can take the resolution down even

more. metaphorically taking down the resolution means going back in time towards 70s and 60s,

something like that... it's such a fun process, simplification. and to make it slightly more

beautiful i guess i will select those top polygons and assign a different material to them,

a copy of the initial blue material but with a slightly adjusted hue to give it a little bit

separation. so congratulations, we have successfully ruined the model that Manu gave to us

for experiments :) thank you so much Manu! we have turned it into a fully fledged pixel art,

we went down the ramp of simplification until we arrived at our ultimate destination: the pixel art.

obviously, simplification usually comes in bundle with exaggeration and Manu will talk about that in

the next video, but for now i will pass it over to Manu for a quick exercise on simplification.