It's Toon Time

This weekend I have mostly been playing with "Toon" shaders in Blender.

The Toon shaders give a model a more comic look which is very different from the photorealistic render of the last blog post.

I followed a YouTube tutorial to create the above shading and I'm pleased with the results. It looks quite sketchy which is the kind of effect I'm after. I've always wanted to make my own comics. Just short 3 panel things that reflect short instances in my life. I have enough experience with LeoCAD to build scenes and put Lego MiniFigure people in them to represent people I know. I'm even considering taking photos of friends and creating vector representations of their faces to add to the MiniFigure heads, just so that people recognise themselves.

It's all down to building the scenes now which will be a lot of fun.

You never know, you might spot yourself in one of my comics.

Going Nowhere And Getting There

This is my first attempt at 3D model compositing.

I'm quite pleased with the result, it's not perfect and I will get better but it at least looks how I imagined it would.

The model was made in LeoCAD and exported to Blender to be rendered with the shadow. The background image was adjusted in GIMP before going into fSpy to act as a Blender camera reference. The model was lined up in Blender and after being rendered the image was taken back into GIMP to be overlaid and composited with the background photo.

To think all this was learned in about 4 weeks and all achieved with free software is quite mind-blowing, even for me. I have lots of ideas now that the method is nailed down.

Staying in just became a lot more fun.