Original subtitles

So to begin with... what is stylized 3d and non-photorealistic graphics? sometimes

you can hear artists describing it like "3d graphics not looking like generic 3d graphics"

while obviously there is nothing wrong with the generic 3d look,

we all intuitively know that type of look. when starting our journey of computer graphics, most of

us 3d artists stay in this box for a while before moving on, so from this perspective stylized means

"looking like something else" or in other words it means, well, adoption of a style. the style as a

set of properties can be defined very broadly. say, it can look like a 2d painting or like a drawing,

like an illustration, like a comics or a pixel art or it can be defined slightly more strictly:

like a diorama or a playstation 2 style game or a recent pixar movie. for example probably

the first thing that comes to mind when we talk about stylizing 3d art is traditional 2d media

and indeed so many techniques and approaches in this field of computer graphics have been inspired

by two-dimensional sensibilities. the hand-drawn or painted look has proven to be super effective in

breathing in some life into generic 3d art. somehow painterly connotations help to position your 3d

art sufficiently far away from that uninspiring 3d look that we get by default when we start.

the manually placed randomized brush strokes, crosshatching effects and other properties of

two-dimensional style like 2d sketching carry on into 3d domain of Blender or

any other software without a hitch and bless it with the artistic qualities.

like we have pointed out already, this style can be defined very loosely or it can be quite specific.

it can be as specific as for example basing your rendering vibe on the comic book look based on the

printing intricacies of the time. it was inspired by a specific technology existing in the specific

historical time having specific set of limitations and features and when we adopt such style, we mimic

some of its most important features, for example the halftone printing pattern that was used

to save some ink or the ink offset that looked a little bit like chromatic aberration. interestingly,

some of the styles that we may want to choose while working in the npr environment are the

styles that were inspired by specific technology or specific limitation of this technology.

think about playstation 1 style low poly models or pixel art that was brought into existence thanks

to some limitations of the technology, but then developed into a fully fledged aesthetics and

some other styles are not so reliant or inspired by a certain technology or medium, like the Studio

Ghibli style which is a constellation of various awesome things and traits which are unique to this

studio and then there are more, there are always more when we talk about non-photorealistic or

stylized, there are multitude of potential styles that you can choose from: low poly, anime, hand-drawn,

voxel art hand-painted textures and the list goes on and on and on and on. when we say "not

generic 3d" we can mean so many different things. actually to put it very roughly, while generic 3d

is one kind of thing, there are multitude of things on the other side of the divide. the other way to

define stylized computer graphics would be to use the term NPR, "non-photorealistic rendering"

which is once again a pretty vague description, but intuitively we all know what this means.

all of us have a strong intuitive understanding of what photorealistic means and how it looks

so once we see it, we know it, we know that this is a photo of a car or a highly realistic render, but

not stylized, clearly not. that being said, sometimes the perception of realism may get a little bit

shaky, even though the rendering quality could be very realistic, in fact that could happen when some

other element like the design of the USPS car in this example will move it to the NPR side

so it's not entirely about rendering. it's about many things like geometry, lighting, perspective

and so on. we will talk about that later. so all things considered, geometry, lighting, shading,

animation, whatever else, it can be closer to or further away from what we vaguely call photorealism.

look at these six characters from Spider-man: Into the Spider-verse, each of them comes from the npr

domain obviously, but each of them at the same time represent different distance from photorealism

and once again, these three characters from Pixar's Soul are also npr but to a different extent we may

say. Manu, what do you think about this gradient of realistic and non-virtualistic things?

I remembered this one talk given by Blender animation studio member Hjalti Hjalmarsson. so you

find this chart in the talk, there are basically the photorealistic-stylized axis, it goes from

fully realistic on the left to super simplified on the right, so for example a photograph

would be in the left corner, a child drawing of a face in the right corner and various mixtures

of those styles in between. the vertical axis is realistic versus abstract or non-representational. it

starts photorealistic and then gradually becomes more and more abstract to the point of collapsing

into a set of artist Kazimir Malevich type of shapes which no longer look like a face at all.

so all possible stylization options can be mapped unto this gamut by Hjalti. it's important to break

the image down into elements, for example rendering style in this image of the USPS car is highly

realistic, but the design style leans towards the toon side of the Hjalti's triangle. unsurprisingly

it shifts the perception of this image towards stylized. separating these things too much could

lead to interesting results. cartoonish proportions plus ultra realistic rendering and bam! uncanny

valley where you no longer know if it's still npr or not :) amazing experiment by Miguel Vasquez!

sometimes when we say stylized 3d we mean "simplified, decorative and exaggerated"

and sometimes in addition to that "abstracted and non-figurative". practically the most of the

techniques related to creating stylized 3d art boil down to these two things: simplification

and exaggeration indeed. it's also a kind of a gradient. using the toolset of reductionist we

decide what aspects of the image should be trashed and what should be left intact. like

do we really need 3d perspective, do we really need lighting so on and so forth and alongside reducing

the unnecessary complexity, we also exaggerate stuff. that's the hallmark of stylized 3d art,

we use raw oil of reality and we exaggerate a few things here and there and artistically transform

it into something cool. or think about it in this way: if the gray horizontal line here is

some basic photoreal state then this wobbly line represents exaggeration and simplification, or in

other words amplifying some aspects of reality and dropping some other things, decimating them. these

two operations seem to be the most fundamental in creating stylized 3d graphics. alright, so far

we covered these definitions: not looking like a generic 3d, non-photorealistic as opposed to

photorealistic, simplified and exaggerated. it all makes sense, but there is the fourth one

which is even more instrumental. stylized 3d could mean "following artist's intention"

this one is a really fundamental principle that takes the artist's intention into account

we take control from software to define the fundamental rules for geometry, perspective,

lighting, rendering and movement according to our artistic intent. our artistic intent may involve

breaking the rules in some crazy way, like what if this girl is casting a demon shadow?

in the realm of all possible creative decisions that one is totally viable.

what we actually do when we create the npr art is that we design the rules for color

for lighting and shadows qualia, for geometry, for perspective, for anything else... for rendering

and for movement... for practically every aspect of the computer graphics pipeline. we take the

control over these things and define precisely how they should function. you may want to imbuy

some of these elements with abstract qualities or representational qualities on the other hand

you can make them realistic or not, cohesive or eclectic in terms of the style used, it's totally

up to you. and incidentally this course has been structured precisely around this theme: breaking

down the NPR art creation pipeline into important elements and then learning how to twist and bend

each one of them according to your artistic goals. and let's see how you as an artist can split the

rendering pipeline into important elements to set your own rules for each one of them.

a major aspect of computer graphics to be aware of as an NPR artist is color.

it starts with choosing and controlling the color palette but then extends onto directly painting

with color and not relying on the shading information generated by the render engine.

color is a very broad and omnipresent consideration in NPR art and it blends in with the

lighting and shading qualia. without light there is no vision and to fully realize our creative vision

we should exactly define how the highlights look, how the gradation between different shades

look, what are the shadows, what is the ambient aspect of lighting and most importantly to what

extent are you ready to simplify and exaggerate the properties of light. getting back to the

color theme it's absolutely fine to drop the lighting altogether and just play with the

solid colors, that's your choice. for example you may want to go shadeless and just paint

everything directly into textures, the lighting i mean and just don't use the light sources at

all in Blender. on the other hand you may very well want to keep it hybrid and use the hand

painted textures with the lighting baked in, but use the light sources of Blender on top of it.

it may end up looking awesome, you know. then we have 3d modeling and everything else that directly

connects to designing the geometry to worry about. the questions that we may ask to ourselves is what

is the shape language or the visual flow that we have chosen for our geometry, what qualities do our

3d forms possess? are they angular or more rounded or spaghetti-like or anything else? like maybe the

building blocks of our three shapes are really blocks, like in Minecraft, voxels in other words.

or does our style of geometry implies the low poly look? aside from color lighting and

geometry we can also control perspective. we can go isometric or orthographic or on the other hand

we can try experimenting with the fisheye look that makes everything bulgy and curvy and... cute,

i think. the perspective experiments can be much more brave than that. think about artistically

twisted perspective, like we see in the Day of the Tentacle. this is a stylistic choice of euclidean

versus non-euclidean space when we think about it. so we are free to bend the rules of space ;)

and then obviously rendering and post-processing is where the big part of the non-photorealistic

magic happens. it's impressive how much you can do with modifiers and nodes in Blender shader editor

and compositor. it's crazy how much we can affect rendering to make our 3d stuff look very cool

indeed. think line art, pixelization, posterization, halftone effects, whatever else we can imagine.

and lastly we can control the low level properties of movement for animation. for example that could

be a stylized motion blur in the Spider-verse which involves smearing and doubling

or it can be a crazy denoising effect in Blender which resembles the Lord of the Rings style vision

or for example the painterly style transfer effect in EbSynth. animation won't be the

focus of the course though, but anyway that's also something that can follow our artistic intention.

so that is what we usually mean when we say stylized 3d:

"not looking like a generic 3d", "non-photorealistic or npr", "simplified and exaggerated" and lastly

"following the artist's intention". i think that's a decent starting point for exploring what does

stylized 3d means for you and with that being said, let's move on to the next video! :)