Our subject is a spherical tree that will get custom radial Normals, mixed colors, and much more. There's lots of good foundational information like how to balance lights, map ranges, and mix colors. Also advanced stuff like lifting Normal Map details and applying them to Custom Normals via Surface Gradients!

I've been working on solving the problem of making clean stylized cartoon shading, specifically for anime style faces. Anyone familiar with 3D anime from shows or games will recognize that dynamic toon shading usually looks bad, or is often avoided entirely. My goal as a 3D artist is to illustrate my own comics, so this is something that could be fixed in post production. But I got curious about why it looked bad, and if it could just be fixed in some convenient way.

A new series about Customizing Normals in Blender! We'll be learning a Normal Transfer based workflow where we model the shapes we want, transfer them to our main mesh and combine them together, then bake them to textures. We'll start with simple options using the Data Transfer Modifier, then get into Geometry and Shader Nodes.

Tired of toon shading looking like crap on your model's face? Do you also hate doing Normal and topology editing to fix it? Here's another method! Our mesh Normals are the source of all our shading problems, so let's stop using them! Instead we'll build new, clean Normals out of Object Coordinates.

How do you put the final touches on a render, or spot fix small issues? A breakdown of my whole setup/process, how I used it, and how to make it yourself.

This article is about how to use the Cybergirl, my first character model release. It is being released as part of a BlenderNPR.org fundraiser for the Blender Extended Expressive Renderer (BEER) project. The Cybergirl is a reskin of my Reimu project with a bunch of my recent experiments added.

Want to render the same objects with different materials on different layers? With the help of some scripting, you can!

Digital painters are used to working with separate layers like shading, color, highlights, etc. This video shows how to make shaders that use these same layers instead of the regular passes, render them out, and then recombine them into a painting setup in Blender or other programs.

How to get a toony look for metallic reflections using textures with various mapping methods.

An in-depth look at creating a short, tight, stretchy skirt or dress and rigging it to behave properly without cloth simulation.

How to make a node setup that splits a texture into tiles and then gets a random tile. And how I made Reimu’s Charm cards using these nodes.

I’m making a tutorial series covering the theory and setup of Projected Texture eyes. This is a method where you move the texture across the geometry instead of moving the geometry itself. This lets you avoid common issues that come up with large toon/anime eyes.

My second try at Rei Ayanami from Neon Genesis Evangelion. This time with fancier light from a fancier workflow, and a new tutorial video! Using Eevee, Cycles, and LANPR+Grease Pencil for line art.

Rei Ayanami from Neon Genesis Evangelion. My latest work in Blender 2.81 using primarily Eevee, but also some Cycles for Indirect light and reflections.