Achieving a surreal result with window texture coordinates in Blender Cycles
Monday, July 8, 2013 - 10:13
The other day, I decided I'd play around with texturing in Cycles, and I think I came up with something kind of interesting. Specifically, I'm using window coordinates to provide a color for my shader, which means that the texture will be flat relative to the camera regardless of the normal of the surface. This effect can be used to render something that looks kind of like it was cut out of a scrapbook, but with lighting effects intact.
The texture node setup for this is actually very simple (see the attached example).
Anyway, it's kind of a cool effect, so I thought I'd share. It might be an interesting way to render highly stylized game backgrounds. :)
Attachments:
Just for kicks, I did a separate freestyle render to get some line art, then combined them. I got this:
The one without the lineart looks pretty cool. Did you try how it looks in motion?
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I didn't, but given the way the textures are set up, what will happen is that the texture patterns will remain stationary while the objects and lighting move. Could be a neat effect. I might try making a video out of it.
Took a while for Blender to render it, although it didn't require a whole lot of attention from me. :)
Here's the video on youtube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YTLVbK90SQI
Wow, that looks really cool! I prefer the unrealistic renders, so this sort of stuff is really interesting to me. The lineart version would look better if it weren't so squiggly.
Man, the more I learn about what Blender can do the more I think I'll have to learn to use it.
The lineart version would look better if it weren't so squiggly.
What you're seeing there is the Freestyle renderer, which Blender uses to do outlines. It's extremely configurable. I've attached another two examples with slightly different line styles.
At any rate, this seems like a cool way that someone with an novice to intermediate skill level (like myself) could make some cool and highly stylized game backgrounds.
Yeah, I like those better. Ah, that's it, I'm looking up Blender tutorials right now.
Blender is definitely worth the time to learn. And frankly, it's a lot easier now than it was 5 years ago since they revamped the interface. For a while, it felt like they were just haphazardly tossing buttons in wherever they fit, so it was pretty haphazard. Now once you learn what all the little icons mean, things make sense.
It's still got kind of a hefty learning curve, but it's not too bad if you follow the tutorial videos.
Noob tip: Blender is heavily keyboard driven so get one of those hotbutton "cheatscreens" for 2.6 and print it out.
IMHO that is actually the main reason why it is considered to have a steep learning curve, as a beginner trying to do things with the (now much better than before) GUI buttons is just frustrating, but once you got a hang of the hotkeys it becomes quite a breeze.
Alternatively if you want to get into 3D modeling, I strongly recommend Wings3D, which is much more beginner friendly and less overloaded with features.
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http://freegamedev.net
On the other hand, with wings3d, you're not likely to be able to achieve this sort of render.
Yeah, the whole reason I've been learning 3D at all is to enhance my 2D work. I'm actually not horrible at using Sketchup now but the free rendering options on that are pretty much non-existant.
Blender does practically everything now, anyway. Plus, it has the best UI I have ever seen.
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