Cool - i guess i was using the "warped diffuse" already, been doing some test with comping different lighting setups over each other:



The 2 (or 3?) litSpheres method was in my mid as well except my idea was cruder - yours seems better, i was going to ask you about a half-lambert but i found this: http://www.derekjenson.com/

As for a lit sphere library there seems to be many online and in this AREA thread they offer 2 libraries : http://area.autodesk.com/forum/Autodesk-Mudbox/general-discussion/mudbox-litsphere-library/ but i plan on making my own.

More interesting stuff:

Thanks for the link. Half lambert can also be done with the incidident node set to Mode=Surface/Lights and Shading range=180-degree

was testing a bit too...

Cool that you're also trying some of this stuff - if the Painting with ICE and your texture instancer are any indication you will soon come up with a kick-ass NPR shader!

That's one funky model there, seems fun to animate with - i like the "banding" on the shading on the neck - gradient?

I hit a bit of a snag with the Lit Sphere:



It is camera-bound so the texture crawls on the surface when it moves - great for some looks but not what i want - i want the texture to stay on the model and only have the shadow and maybe highlights a bit disturbed. In a temporal coherent way of course > hey ya gotta push it until it's right? (or until you've lost too much sleep and have to move on! ;-) )

I do have a method now: render map the lit sphere/grayball result and use those textures to get the desired result. Have tried that a little already and see some progress, plugging the rendermapped texture in the bump is somewhat interesting. But i could also just use it as a texture - although then it looks a little Clone Wars and i hate that show ;-)

Anyhoo there is a drawback and that is that i would have to rendermap every single object in the scene, if i have to i will but lemme check if there's another way: Is there a way to "freeze" the lit sphere? I realize it can't be done with grayball applied directly to the meshes but you said something about the enviroment sphere moving in sync > can i set up an sphere say around my character and then sample that back?

Also seeing the nodes in that Half-Lambert setup by Derek Jenson had me thinking: if you can sample surface vector and light direction isn't there a way to perturb that data? Like you can in ICE with "Turbulize around Value"? Maybe i'm trying to re-invent the wheel here (your Painting with ICE) but i dig the idea of only shadows getting funky. This is simple with something like phong specular but shadows are little more resistent to getting messed with apparently..

yes of course, usually this method is called "bump map", or "normal map" - exactly, only surface shading normal is modified, that should be enough.

Anyway just to add another one, 99% an reinventing the wheel, but anyway:
there is also a trick to smooth normals across many polygons, not just one. In ICE, take normals from neighbors and 'self' normal, take an array average of both, repeat the execution several times, convert result to vertex color ( should be 'float' type).
In render tree, convert vertex color to vector, plug this into 'normal' input of Bump Map Generator, set 'Base Normal' in Bump Map Generator to "relative to input normal". Result is a some kind of subsurface-like effect.

Yeah sorry it was a little late and and i was a little burned out when i posted that last night - i've been working on this look for about 6 days straight...

I just experimented with bump and displacement and you can get some nice "thick" oil/acryl painted look but not quite what i want, i'm looking to get this feel:



(Jaun Gimenez - my favourite artist!)

I think the best way is to comp a shadow pass (or several) with a texture map pass - as i said i think i can get it right with a rendermapped lit sphere but am still intrigued by "freezing" the gray ball on multiple objects (i.e. as override material or group material) - not only for this project but as a way of texturing many objects in an unigue way, i really like the way it follows contours and stuff, ideal for easily getting meshes to look "painted" on, if you pause the youtube example you will see what i mean.

Just wanted to add this game as an example of cool NPR:



Now i think this is purely done through texture maps and slightly "glowy" post effect... correct me if i'm wrong

@ Mattheus: on second reading i am intrigued by your ICE idea, when say many polygons you still mean on a single mesh right? Afaik you can't apply ICE on a group or anything, i got this add-on (by luceric?) last year that could apply an ICEop to multiple objects though...

And when you say neighbor you mean another mesh? Sorry i'm really crap at this stuff...

(mods: the emoticons are acting weird! )

one ICE tree on one mesh, but I think you can forget this one - effect is similar to what mi_fast subsurface is doing, if it outputs only the raw front scattering, ... something like that.

Now seriously, I think you expect a bit too much from this "polygon painted" teapot. I'd believe it's better strategy to output something like pure incidence render from SI, normals render, AO render, outline render, so on, then try to do the best in post, driving the effects in post with those renders.
At least, long time ago, one fellow programmer and me, we spent a lot of time trying to get some kind of look, similar to game you showed. Finally it was mainly a post-process trickery, with only difference that this one was built in game engine.

Lol well put! Yeah i had already given up on the "painted polygons" because it was too course and quite expensive, that's why i renamed the thread: more of a general exploration of NPR techniques.

But at the moment i'm a bit (hyper)focused on getting the look of my project right to really do a thread like that... I think when get a little more settled i'll make a nice thread collecting all the Softimage NPR options i can find, it's a subject i've very been interested in since about 2001 with the Animatrix and Michael Arias' work.

For now though just to obsess (or learn) a little more: what could you use a normals render for? I imagine some kind of post-effect but i can't think what... and would you be able to do it in the FxTree or After Effects? That and Toxik/Composite are my only options..

Also i'm still curious about texture mapping multiple objects without merging them, i had some interesting succes with using camera mapping on a group - i could even freeze it but of course there was the stretching > wich is why i made a post about getting this to work: http://www.softimageblog.com/archives/225

I know, i know, i'm all over the shop but i'm getting close now so any hints are very welcome!

I wish hehe NPR as a subject is certainly intriguing. I was doing some experiments with texture instancing to produce the flake effekt like in the car shader. It worked pretty well, atm I'm thinking there might at least be a chance to get a painterly effect alone by using a very carefully designed bump/normal map.



)) Yes that's the Valve Half Lambert+Gradient thing with shadows added on top.



interesting approach. I thought baking the grayball effect would produce too much stretching when the model moves, but being baked it could be of course edited away in PS.



freezing probably won't work because it's not tied to UVs that could be frozen. It needs eyeray and normal vector, which could be stored and reappied. But for that you'd need baking again.