Achieving the NPR look

One of the goals of the Divine Consultants short film project has been to try and achieve a non-photorealistic look with our 3D assets. Something along the line of Telltale's Walking Dead, Wolf Among us, Borderlands and other stylized video games. A look inspired by realtime graphics that's pushed a little bit further with offline rendering and heavy compositing. Generally this means having line art in the character textures but also rendering some kind of cartoony outlines.

So far the most efficient way to do this is to use the normal pass; blurring the normal pass a slight amount and then comparing the difference to the original image generates lines where there's details. This black and white image can then be further adjusted and multiplied on top of the original image.

Here's how the passes look like:

Character's beauty pass

Normal pass

Generated outlines

NPR look development

Here's a brand new test shot for Divine Consultants. Testing out a more stylized and saturated NPR look with outlines. More about the development in a later post.. And don't mind the audio; it's just a guide for the voice overdubbing.

Shot development for Divine Consultants

I've been insanely busy working on all things related to Divine Consultants. Modeling, texturing assets, preparing scenes, doing simple animating and rendering frames + compositing them. The amount of work is just insane. But it's cool ...and even fun at times. Hah.

Here's a couple of new test shots that I made for the project:

Motion capture and retargeting the face

Here's my first proper test of using cleaned motion capture data and facial retargeting in Blender. Voice acting is still based on the on-set recording; the audio will be dubbed later.

Overall, I think the expressions work pretty nicely in sync. Rendered using Blender's native viewport.

Rooftops of the Hellish City

Here's a new conceptual rendering that I made for the Divine Consultants animated short film project. Featuring the main characters Oogle and Joy and the rooftops of Hellish City. Check out the high res version.

Here's a matcap clay rendering of the same scene:

Joy character portrait

Oogle character portrait