Original subtitles

Probably destined to be the most ideal non-photoreal shading option is a

new render engine entirely and actually there is one in development called MALT

it sees it right here on the main page i've gone to the Blendernpr.org website which is actually

very cool, here's the home page there's loads of really cool npr related things going on here well

worth checking outm on the bare side of things that'll take us to this page and we'll see it's

a super flexible renderer to handle non-photoreal and stylized rendering and there's much more to

learn about it all here, the project is currently looking for extra funding to fast track this into

completion, there's a few ways to do this, it's possible to support it through this main page

there's actually a Patreon account for the npr show right here and that will help for the show

and the general BEER project, these guys are all closely linked to that particular project, there's

also a Patreon account for the main core developer and actually the very cool thing is is that it's

actually available to try right now. if we find our way to this address we can download it right here

we're currently sponsoring this as you can see to help watch this along a little bit

because i'm on a Windows system all i'm going to need to do is to download the zip file which

includes the MALT renderer which is this one so this is an add-on and so that we've got something

to play with once we enable that add-on, we're going to need to download the shader examples

probably an important additional thing to get is actually another copy of Blender as well

the latest official build, now to keep it separate from your main Blender build that you might have

on your machine i would recommend to go to this link right here which allows us to get a portable

Windows version right there and then we can place that in a folder which is relevant to you and we

can kind of keep it penned off from the rest of Blender. but we'll talk more about that in

just a second i've downloaded those three zips to this location on my hard drive but you can

put that anywhere you like, then all we need to do is unzip the version of Blender 2.92 is the

latest one as i record this, so i've unzipped that to here and also i've unzipped the shader examples

something that we need to do with the Blender version though is that we need to come into

where we see the numbered version of Blender that we've got inside the folder that we've extracted

and we need to manually create this config folder which as you can see i've already

done in this case, then we just need to step back into the main folder and then launch

the Blender.exe that we've unzipped. once we open up Blender we want to come to our preferences

which we can get to in the edit menu if we like or hit F4 and find our preferences in that menu and

then just come down to the add-ons tab and then we're going to come over to the install area, click

on that and navigate to where we have the Blender MALT add-on on our hard drive and then just click

install add-on. this might take actually a little while, so you might need to be patient for about 30

seconds or maybe even a minute, so just bear that in mind this seems to take a little bit longer

than the average add-on, i've actually already done this though, so i can type in MALT into the search

field and then enable it from here so with that enabled we can now find in our render engine area

we can see MALT as an option, Cycles by the way is an add-on in exactly the same way, here we'll

notice in the add-ons we can find Cycles right here, so it makes sense that malt can be an add-on

like that and then we can switch to it just like we would Cycles here. with that a whole bunch of

what would be irrelevant information has now gone from our render tab and if we come over

to our materials, we'll see all this area looks a little bit different as well. instead of the cube

i'm going to delete this and get something with a little bit more interesting forms about it, so

i've opened up the isometric scene from an earlier part and i've just grabbed a few of these objects

and just gone Ctrl C and i'm going to come over to here and go Ctrl V. with that done we've got some

more interesting geometry to play with now and we have some materials that are already created

i'm going to delete the outlines, because we won't need that, so i'll just go through each of these

objects and take the outlines away, this boolean object we don't really need i'm going to delete

it. this currently is solid shading mode so we can press Z to bring ourselves into rendered mode

and we'll see a big bright loud yellow telling us that things are definitely not all correct

really all that means is that we haven't indicated which shader to use and this is where those shader

examples come in that we used earlier, so we can come over to the folder navigate to where we unzip

those and we can play around with all of these, the most basic one is this basic.mesh so we can

select that and click accept and now things are starting to look a little bit better. i'll also

do something similar with this other object, this base material, so i'll click on the shader examples,

find where we have our shader examples and again choose the basic mesh, then hit accept. now things

are looking a lot better, but they're looking almost exactly shadeless, so instead of yellow

we've got this dark gray, but we'll see why that is in a second if we bring our lamp a little bit

closer we can see we're getting at least something now, we're getting this diffuse color, the world is

actually quite bright at the moment but i don't think that actually affects the way things are

rendered, our overall lighting is controlled just with individual lamps, rather than incorporating

world lighting like Eevee might do so we can choose to treat this just like a background color

that helps us work when thinking about shading to believe for non-photoreal rendering we might want

to come over to our color management and switch this from Filmic to Standard, all of this stuff

still works by the way so we can come in here and choose different levels of contrast or even

tweak it with our curves. as for the lamps we can come over to our light settings and the sunlight

will workm the spotlight will work if we rotate it correctly double tap R, but the area light

doesn't, hopefully that gets incorporated later down in the development cycle, so let's switch this

back to a sun for now so that we're getting even lighting across and the distance from the lamp

isn't factored in. you also might notice that there's a shader option even here so we can

click new and point it to the shader source and we'll find there's a basic light option also and

now there really isn't anything happening again, we get that dark gray similar as we did before, but we

can click on New here and i'm actually just going to set this to say color grid and then click on ok

and then now you'll see we can actually rotate the color grid around and it treats it as a

projected light texture. but for our purposes here at the moment i'm going to remove this shader

and just keep the simple default lighting here. all right so let's take this one of

these geometry objects in the scene and come back over to the material tab in the properties window

although this is only a very basic shader, we can actually get a fairly toon looking thing going on

quite quickly, so let's change our diffuse color first of all let's make this a little bit more

i'm going to push this into the green like all this stuff is actually grass, something like that

and then on the other one on the road let's actually make this a water road aka a river

of some kind or a stream. all right so that's cool and then i'm going to come back to the main base

so to get a kind of very simple toon shading right out of this shader, this basic mesh shader, i'm just

going to turn the roughness up to something like 2 or 3 and now with that we can rotate our

sun around a little bit just to see how that is affecting things. now basically what's happening

here is it's adding the specular color on top of the diffuse and the diffuse kind of on top

of the ambient, so the ambient is going to be this darkest area, so we could turn this down a little

bit or we could brighten that up to crazy levels, i'm just going to take it quite dark and then for

the specular color, i'm going to go Ctrl C and Ctrl V, the same color and we see that's being added on

top and now we can adjust this to taste or even actually choose a completely different color

but that might read a little strangely, so i'm just going to keep it in the greens and then the darker

we make this the less contrast we're going to get from the original tone, so something like that will

be fine, taking the roughness right back down the other way should probably cause no surprise

although to see that a little better let's sort of take that right back up to white again, we can see

those little flashes. all right, so that's the basic mesh shader, but probably a better one for more

toon related things would be the gradient mesh, so if we accept this here we'll get a recognizable

gradient for the diffuse and the specular and if we set our interpolation from linear to

constant and then create a different positions for these various stops along that gradient we'll see

we get very much that toon style we've become accustomed to, so i can control click in here

just to create an extra couple of stops, take this up a little bit into the mid grays, actually let's

grab this stop actually make this one in between those two and this last one, let's put that about

there and now it almost looks like a river going through a canyon of some kind, almost, if we were to

maybe enhance our scaling a little bit perhaps :) another very cool toon shading option is the

basic line mesh, so let's accept that and this text was back to the familiar ambient diffuse

and specular from before, but we've also got this line setting so let's take this black line as we

have at the moment and we'll change the line width and as we do that, we'll notice that we've got two

sets of lines, which can only mean one thing, i've still left the solidify modifier on this,

so i'm going to delete that and just go around and delete it from the other objects as well and

we didn't need that boolean anymore, same here, this solidify modifier, we need though for the thickness

of the river stream road, whatever we're calling it, let's jump back to the material and here we have

even more control over where we actually see our lines, so we have this normal threshold, which as

i'm sure you can tell already is giving us a way more control over we could in conventional

Eevee or Cycles settings, something else that's worth pointing out in terms of the differences between

this render engine and other render engines is that if we were to be using the toon style shading

but let's just quickly switch back to that and click on the gradient mesh there it's preserved

our various stops that we had along the way there and if we select our lamp we can actually change

the color of this and we can see our shader picks that up and mixes this color in with our gradient

which is not something very easily done within Eevee or Cycles, certainly within Cycles since we don't have

the Shader to Rgb node. here i've jumped into a scene shared by Miguel, the core developer for MALT,

and in addition to it being a really fun scene something that i wanted to point out on this is

pay attention to the eyes and the mouth and notice how they appear to be on the surface from this

angle, but if we go around the side a little bit we can see they're actually embedded inside the

model, so if we switch into wireframe and switch on the X-ray mode that can be toggled with Alt

Z or we can find it up here, we have our X-ray now, we can see that there's a couple of objects placed

inside, switching back to rendered view, is a simple matter of switching the depth offset slider option

that we have here thanks to this eyes.mesh shader that we've got here, both the eyes and the mouth

are using this type of shader, so this is another very cool benefit of using this render engine,

especially once a lot of this interface also gets cleaned up, remember this is a constant work in

progress and this is where we're at so far, even in this unfinished state it's pretty cool to play

with, now it's possible to do something like this in the current Blender and that's where i'll jump

over to Luca's blend file to show something super cool that he's been doing with nodes in this scene

so we can see here i am in Eevee and basically what we're looking to do is create a parallax

effect, so we can see that this plane that we have here looks kind of like a window

and this is pretty accurate stuff because if we create a new plane and then press G, Z and then

-1 to place exactly one Blender unit, below one meter then we'll see that things line

up perfectly so if we see this area right here it kind of joins with this plane perfectly and

the depth can be controlled here with this simple value so the further we push this, so if we take

this to one and we take this another unit down so G Z -1 again then we'll see it should

all line up again, but it's even deeper now. Luca has put together another little example with this

cylindrical head here, so there's a few more nodes with this version, because we're creating some eyes

and a mouth, but if we go full screen on this we'll notice that it appears like the eyes are kind of

following us there, this is a great example of this, because it really does look like there's

some geometry inside here, but it's all just completely done on the surface and it's all

in shading nodes, even the teeth have that kind of parallax going on, Luca is absolutely brilliant

at this kind of stuff and that's why we've teamed up with Luca to generate an entire course on cool

nodal manipulation, so if you want to get a massive boost to your nodal texturing awareness in Blender

we would highly advise you to walk along the brick road of no discovery as it were with Luca

it's quite the rabbit hole to go down, but highly empowering nonetheless.

this .blend file right here by the way should be available for you in the project files for this

Stylized Art in Blender course should you want to have a look or incorporate it into your own scenes.