Original subtitles

Hey hey! Gleb Alexandrov here :) welcome to yet another tutorial from Creating Stylized 3d

Art in Blender series. in this one we'll explore various NPR techniques of Blender compositor

to recreate this post-processing style of Spider-verse, so keep watching to learn more

about the stylized comic book printed look. it's a pretty lengthy tutorial, so buckle up.

so before moving on to the post processing section of this tutorial, i want to walk you

through this scene setup really quickly to show how things were done in terms of shaders, lighting,

some other intriguing things worth exploring. so first of all it's Cycles with gpu compute, gpus are

usually way faster than cpus for Cycles rendering obviously. all the shaders and light sources where

pre-setup in this scene (make sure to download it) the only thing i will do is enable denoising and

set Optix as the denoising algorithm then i'll bring down the render samples to something like 10

for a funky denoising effect. we have talked about this effect in one of the previous tutorials from

the course. i love the oil painting or watercolor painting look that this effect gives you. okay...

then we have an image-based background which is a hack to add some extra NPR at no cost. you see,

because we use an already stylized image as our backdrop and the source of illumination, which is

the city backdrop processed in Krita we're already playing on the NPR field so to speak and the same

image is used as the source of illumination for the robo. the only difference between it in the

background is that we have cranked up the emission strength from 1 to 15 to add some extra power.

so all the lighting that is hitting the robo comes from this source rather than the backdrop itself.

this separation is pretty useful to be able to control the levels precisely. and if you are

interested to learn more about how the background image was created, i found one on Pixabay and then

i just smudged it a little bit in Krita with the help of the purple brushes that uses some smudging

it doesn't take a lot of effort to do something like that, it took me like five minutes, i think,

to turn it into some hybrid between a photo and a painting. it does read as a photo still, but with

some painterly elements. okay we can disable overlays over there, if they're getting in the

way and the other important thing is that i have broken the scene into a set of layers, the first

one being the backdrop, the light sources are also packed in this one, then the next layer is robo,

we can turn it on and off, then we have floor, which is a three-dimensional plane which reflects the

backdrop and these things kind of blend together and it creates the illusion of a seamless backdrop,

i think. and that's pretty exciting by itself, because that's how different planes of reality,

two-dimensional three-dimensional, interact with each other and the result is pretty gorgeous. what

else? of course we could have used Eevee as our render engine, especially with the screen space

reflections it looks comparable to what Cycles can give us... but still not quite. well, maybe with

the addition of the Irradiance Volume that can be found under the Shift A menu in the viewport Light

Probe > Irradiance Volume it looks slightly closer to the Cycle's awesomeness, but still not there.

anyway if you wish to set it up using Eevee just don't forget to bake indirect lighting and it will

look pretty convincing i think. i would also crank up the subsurface scattering samples in this case.

so you can follow along this tutorial with either the Cycles or the Eevee version, i would probably

switch to Cycles though, i think it's slightly more special. so i think it's time to move on

into compositor and start working on the Spider-verse type of look that we can give this thing

all right, the first thing that i will do is set up render layers, so over there at

the top of the user interface we can find the layers menu. i'll name this layer All

to signalize that we render all things on this layer just for the sake of the preview

let's uncheck Use for Rendering checkbox because we won't use this one for rendering

it's just a backup if we manage to screw everything else. then i will create a new layer,

let's call this one Background or Backdrop. this one will contain the objects for the background.

here we have a bunch of toggles, but not quite the amount that we want to have. in order to organize

it in a better way, i will enable these three which is the Render toggle, the Holdout toggle and the Indirect toggle. of course we could have used the Exclusion toggle to say remove the robot from the

scene but the problem is... as soon as we remove the robo, we remove its reflection and so on, so we'd

better use this one instead which is Indirect Only. if you press Shift while clicking on this

icon it will also affect all the sub collections. so right now it's very interesting, because we see

the reflection without actually seeing the robo. that's totally a wonderland situation

that we are facing here. so we can also disable the camera and irradiance layers, but that's

not important at all, because they are invisible anyway. next i will create a new one for the robo.

and here comes the same issue, if we exclude this collection from rendering, we will also

exclude its reflections and shadows it casts and so on, so we'd better use the Indirect button,

don't forget to hold the Shift before pressing it, otherwise thesub-collections won't be included.

so the floor collection and the background collection are now

set to Indirect Only but the image is totally black. while it may be fine in some cases, for

compositing it's often more convenient to have the transparent background, so we can compose

these elements on top of one another. that really makes sense for compositing. i will call this layer

Robo because i forgot to do it beforehand, so now we have the background layer and the robo layer

and the layer that is called All that is just a backup. so unlike the old layer all other layers

have Use for Rendering checkbox turned on. a minor detail yet very important to get it right

after we have split it into layers or collections it's time to compose them.

but first i will open up the image editor in this window and select Render Result here, because

that's where i would like to see our composed and rendered result. in order to use the image

editor for previewing the render, we need to set this preference within the Blender Preferences

otherwise it will be shown in a separate window. and this one is going to be the Compositor itself

the biggest of our windows available. click on the Use Nodes checkbox, otherwise it will be useless

press N to toggle the right tool shelf then i'll go ahead and render out what we have set up so

first goes the background layer then the robo layer and as a result we see...

nothing. because here we have it set to All. we can change it to something that has been

rendered actually, like, robo. i will also disconnect the composite node... to reconnect it back later on.

i will use the viewer node instead for the sake of previewing what we are doing. after doing this

we can either enable the Backdrop Mode in the compositor then place our backdrop somewhere on

the right, but we risk obscuring it with the nodes later on, but anyway the V shortcut scales it down

Alt V scales it up, Ctrl Shift and clicking on the node allows us to preview the node or rather one

of the outputs, but anyway, i think i will resort to this window that we have created earlier to

preview what we are doing, so holding Ctrl Shift and clicking on the node allows us to skim through

its inputs to set them to preview. that's how we're gonna be working in this tutorial, so we don't need

the composite node just yet alright so i'm going to select this render layer, Shift D and set the

second one to Robo. now we just need to recompose them back into the wholesome image. so i'm going

to go Shift A, Color and select this node that is called Alpha Over and now hook the background

render layer into the first input Ctrl Shift to preview it... and this one into the second input of

the Alpha Over node. it won't hurt to enable the Convert Pre-multiply checkbox it's the same in my

opinion as setting the pre-multiply value to one. so the beauty of this workflow of recombining the

layers into one image is that we can still tweak each layer individually, like for example we can

make the background a little bit brighter with the help of the rgb curves node or pretty much

anything you can imagine that is related to nodes, it all can work separately on each layer.

so for now i will press X to delete this rgb curves, i used it only to demo this thing, i

will set this window back to Rendered Result otherwise the render will start...

rendering in some other window, it often happens in Blender. so that's useful to know if you want

to press F12 to render it out it will occupy some other window if you don't set it to Rendered Result

and then don't forget to switch it back to Viewer node after it's rendered. it's

a pretty clumsy way of working, setting it back and forth to render result and then back

to viewer node. i will show you a slightly more convenient option, but that will be a bit later :)