Original subtitles

Hey hey! :) Gleb here. let's talk about gradients Manu-style... manu-facturing gradients, if you wish.

Gradients... with gradients images become a little bit nicer in my mind even though there

is nothing wrong with plain surfaces either. in the previous episode of the Creating Stylized

3d Art course we talked about color, namely limited color palettes the distribution of

colors in the image, the uninterrupted swatches of pure colors... pure, but not very pure so to

speak. because a super duper important thing for the Manu's style as i see it is gradients.

it's a special kind of smoothness that presents itself everywhere, in the surfaces, in the shaders,

in the reflections, within the chrome surfaces, because the environment also is a little bit

gradient-ish and obviously in the backdrops. well, obviously there is nothing wrong with

going absolutely flat and solid in terms of backdrops and in terms of

colors in your image and many artists excel at this style. it totally depends on your unique brand

of artistic stylization, but when we try to dissect and analyze the properties that make the amount

of style what it is, the gradient's strike is one of the most characteristic, most important things.

i would say it's a general aesthetic perception of smoothness everywhere in the design, but also

in the visualization. so what makes it so special? why does it work? let's have a brief look at some

interesting properties of gradients and how you can exploit it in your art. swoosh... gradients

denote depth. we are used to seeing aerial perspective as a hint of the distance and depth

and i think that's one of the important properties of gradients and why they add a little bit of

three-dimensionality to the image. and in addition to that it looks kind of easy on the eyes because

gradients are everywhere in nature, for example a relatively flat backdrop like... an open space can be

made a little bit more three-dimensional by adding some transition between the darker shade of blue

and the lighter shade of blue, it almost gives a direction to the whole thing and even creates

sort of a vanishing point. the brighter colors tend to recede into the distance, again, that's

a hint of an aerial perspective, so we kind of make it a little bit more deep and in addition to that,

gradients is a great compositional tool. let's say, we can have one strong center of interest

which is a planet in this case, but we can also like create the second center of interest by

playing with the radial gradient. because our eyes are naturally drawn to the points of contrast.

and now, voila, this is a symmetrical composition. nicely done! and once again this effect was

achieved by utilizing the power of the gradients. let's have a look at one more composition.

so here we have a super emphasized center of interest, but it could have looked pretty lonely

in the context of the entire frame so by... by utilizing the gradient that pretty much

goes in this direction from the darker regions of the image towards the lighter spot in the center

it's inevitable that the eye will be glued to *this* portion of the image that is the brightest.

um it will go from dark to light like we'll be drawn to this portion of the image like a

magnet is here or something like that. and on the contrary the darker edges, the vignette

created by gradient will ward the eye off of going towards the edges and escaping the image.

so it's kind of a double compositional win if you think about it. so yeah, gradients are good

for denoting depth and lighting and some direction, but also as a compositional tool.

okay hello, Manu here! let's look at how the tools work for gradients. so in Krita let's select the

gradient tool and put color to blue, some kind of nice blue and for the background color

some kind of red, then let's check that the gradient is from the foreground to the background

and then just draw a line and you're done. it's very simple. in tool options you can put it

to radial or linear or all the other choices, by clicking the small arrow between the colors, you

can switch colors. and in Blender we can use the gradient node to make gradients

in this example for the world you can see the node setup in here. it's quite simple to make.

and look at how you know how nice sunset we have we have. also those different options for gradients

just like in Krita, but linear works best for the world setting by adjusting the sliders you

can change the colors easily and with plus and minus you can remove them or add them

also by holding down ctrl and clicking on the color strip you can add those markers

and so here we have a nice nice gradient background which reflects from the car.

cool! :) when you make a gradient it might make sense to add a little bit of other colors than just

two and then blur everything. i think it makes a gradient more fresh

in a way. then you can also add gray noise on top of it. you probably cannot see this image,

because of the video compression, so here it is with 10 times zoom.

so when you have this grey pixelated noise image on top of your gradient and in overlay or multiply

blending mode, then you get rid of the banding which is very annoying. it helps that Photoshop

and Gimp has this dither option for gradients. so that's about it for the gradients. short and sweet.

yay! and what is also important, gradients and soft lights are friends, our biggest

friends in the universe ;) because gradients not only denote some kind of lighting, they are created by

the soft lighting. you can have just a few objects in the scene like we have here,

it's the Manu's scene obviously and then bam!

one light source which is relatively big and thus relatively soft, it creates a bunch of gradients

all over the place. the bounced lighting specifically, but also like the general diffuse

lighting and reflections, all of these things contribute to drawing a bunch of gradients

across the image, across the surfaces, especially considering the fact that the surfaces themselves

are curved, so we have... the highlight and the shadow and the transition between them

and this transition is the softer the bigger is the light source. well, without denoising it's a bit

problematic to see it in its full glory, but with the viewport denoising, which is Optix in my case

here but it can be Intel open image denoiser, it's much more soft and smooth. so by using the softer

light sources, which are basically the bigger light sources in relationship to the objects

we can create a huge variety of gradient effects. that partially brings us back to the point that

the realistic rendering is a part of this kind of style, because without the bounced

lighting and without the physically correct reflections we wouldn't have had gradients,

which is somewhat ironic. all right awesome! thanks for watching, i'd like to mention once again

that let all the flowers bloom, there are different kinds of stylization,

solid colors, flat colors can look awesome like in this game acid by Nicolas Buchot

or you can go pretty solid and flat, but spice it up with the use of gradients just a little bit,

like in this image by Scott Zenteno, an amazing concept art. and there are different kinds of

things like... well, pixel art, that has quantized transitions between one color and the other

but still some gradients are readable arguably, and still it looks fantastic! kudos to Valerii Kim.

thanks for watching! my name is Gleb Alexandrov and you're watching

the Creating Stylized 3d art video course for Blender by Manu Järvinen and Creative Shrimp team.