Create a Retro Anime Character Illustration with Blender 3D

1. Introduction: We. Hello, and welcome to the exciting world of Retro Aime Aesthetics and Blender. I'm Harry, a season three D artist with over a decade of professional experience and the privilege of being recognized as a top teacher here on Skillshare, specializing in blender tutorials. In this class, we'll embark on a creative journey together, diving into the nostalgic world of retro anime Aesthetics. Whether you have fond memories of staying at pastor bedtime to catch your favorite anime or waking up early on a Saturday morning for thrilling battles between characters. This class is designed to replicate that enchanting aesthetic. Even if you're new to the world of anime, you'll pick up techniques that can be applied to various types of stylized renders. My blender classes are known for their clarity and ease of follow through. Thanks to my step by step beginner friendly approach. In this class, we'll use a pre made character, which you'll gain access to as both an untextured starter file and a fully textured file available to download from the project resources. Please note that Blender version 4.1 or newer is required to use these provided files and follow along in class. You can download the newest version of blender completely free from their website. Throughout our journey, we'll focus on the low fidelity and hand drawn aspects of this retro anime style, from creating stylized anime materials with vibrant colors to accentuating them with linework that adds a hand drawn feel. You'll learn all the essential elements of this unique aesthetic. To recreate this nostalgic atmosphere, we'll also utilize layered compositing effects and blender, adding all the low fidelity artifacts that time may have erased from our collective memories. As a bonus for students with access to photoshop, we'll even place our final render on a real CRT television for an authentic touch. By the end of this class, you'll be amazed at how convincingly you can transform your renders into images reminiscent of your favorite anime from childhood. So if you're ready for a fun and creative adventure, I invite you to join me in class. Let's jump into our first lesson together. 2. Starter File Exploration: Week we we In this lesson, we'll beginning familiar with our starter file. Let's begin. If this is your first time taking a blender class, I'd highly recommend you start with my complete beginners guide to Blender first. This class was designed for the absolute beginner to Blender and three D art in general. We cover every single necessary topic in order to get you up to speed and running and blender. We'll accomplish this with short and focused lessons that cover each topic from a beginner's perspective, utilizing a well organized starter file. We end the class with an easy project where you set up and customize your very own cozy campsite. With that out of the way, let's continue with the lesson. As an additional disclaimer. If you've never touched blender before, I strongly suggest that you try my complete beginners guide to Blender three D first. This anime class will follow a very clear and beginner focused step by step method, just like all of my other classes. However, I will be taking for granted that you have at least a very basic understanding of blender and navigating the viewport. You'll still very likely be able to follow along in this class if you're completely new. However, you'll get a lot more from the class if you completed at least one of my other classes first. Before we begin, make sure you've downloaded all of the files from the class resources section for this class. This includes things like the starter file shown on screen now, and the texture images we'll use throughout this class. Make sure you have the starter file, Underscore retro anime render, underscore 01 file open now, as that's the file we'll be discussing in this lesson. If you're using Blender 4.2 or newer, you'll need to download and open the Blender 4.2 version of this starter file instead. This starter file has the word Blender 4.2 in the name. This file has some adjusted settings and light positions to make it work better for the updated version of the EV render engine. One thing to note about this new version is that you'll notice a slight difference between the look of your highlights and shadows on the character due to the way that Blender 4.2 handles lighting. This will not prevent you in any way from following the lessons in this class, but don't be worried if the shadows and highlights on your render appear slightly different than the video. You'll still end up with an awesome retroime render by the end of the class. Files that I've provided in the class resource section already have most of their settings done for you. However, I figured it might be beneficial to walk you through some of these settings to get familiar with our file before we start. The first thing that you'll notice is that I've already created a custom anime style character for us to use in the class. This character has a few materials already finished, and it has placeholder materials applied for the ones that will create together in class. I've also created and positioned the camera for us so that we can focus on materials and post processing effects during the class. We can switch this left viewport here, which shows our camera view to the rendered mode by clicking this button here at the top right. So we can click this button here. And then that'll switch it to show the actual materials that are currently applied to the scene. If for some reason, you're unable to see this button hovering above the left viewport, click and hold your middle mouse button in, so click in the mouse wheel and then drag on this to slide it back and forth to reveal this button here on the far right. That leads us to the next aspect of this file, and that's the render engine. Over here on the right side, inside the render properties tab, which is the back side of this camera here. We'll see that we're using the EV render engine. We'll be using the EV render engine for this class as it's the easiest way to achieve the anime style materials that we want to replicate. I'll explain this process in a later lesson. It's also worth noting that the EV render engine is lightning fast, so your final render should take less than a minute in most cases. The last thing that I want to discuss is our render output resolution. We can find that here in the output settings by clicking this little printer icon, which is the output properties. I've opted for a 43 aspect ratio for our render. This means that our final render will match the same aspect ratio of an old CRT television, which works great for the nostalgic look that we're after. A resolution here of 2000 by 1,500 works really well for this. With this last explanation out of the way, we're ready to proceed with the rest of the class. And our next lesson, we'll add some HDRI lighting to our scene. I'll see you there. 3. HDRI Lighting Setup: We we seven. In this lesson, we'll add some HDRI lighting to our scene. Let's begin. The first step to this whole process will be to finalize our lighting. You might have noticed that we have some lighting in our scene already. You can see that here on the shoulders and here on the chest. This is thanks to the three point lights that I already placed around the scene. These lights provide a nice amount of highlighting around the edges of our character. However, we are missing some general fill lighting to illuminate the darkest areas. We'll be accomplishing this, utilizing an HDRI light that is set to a relatively low value. If you're unfamiliar with HDRI lighting in the simplest terms, it's light that's generated by an image. This image needs to be a high dynamic range image, which is where the term HDRI comes from. These types of images have a lot of extra data inside them that allows blender to use them to generate accurate lighting, shadows, and reflections. This stylized anime scene won't really have true reflections, so all we really need from it is the lighting and the shadows. Luckily, for us, Blender already includes some HDRIs when you download the program. However, they are a bit hidden. I've provided a Sunrise HDRI in the class resources. However, this is the exact same HDRI file you can find in the program files for your Blender install. I've just taken the time to find it for you, so you don't need to search through your folders for it. But again, it's the exact same image. Due to this type of lighting being imaged based, we're actually going to need to switch to our shading workspace to add it to our scene. We can find the shading workspace here at the top center, and then we can click here on the word shading to switch over to the shading workspace. In this top right viewport, we're going to want to switch to our rendered viewport mode again. So we can do that by clicking this button here. And this will allow us to see the full effect of the lighting. Again, if you're unable to see these buttons for whatever reason, hover over top of this toolbar, click in your middle mouse button, which is the scroll wheel, and then paint it back and forth until you can see these buttons here and then click the far right one. The last thing we need to do before adding our HDRI is to switch the Shader editor down here on the bottom from the object mode found here on the left. We're going to click this, and we're going to switch it to world. That's where this HDRI image is going to live. If this is the very first time you're seeing the node system within blender, let me give you a very brief rundown. This work space down here is called our Shader editor. You can zoom in and out on the Shader editor by scrolling up on your mouse wheel or down on your mouse wheel to zoom in and out. You can pan around this view by clicking in your mouse wheel to slide the view left or right or up and down. Each of these squares that we're seeing on screen are called nodes. Nodes pass their attributes from left to right. Each node has colored dots on it, called sockets. You pass the properties of a left node to a right node by connecting its sockets together with a wire, such as this green line here, connecting the background socket to the surface socket. To add more complex effects, you'll simply add another appropriate node and connected together with the other nodes in the system going from left to right. Going to be keeping most of our textures pretty simple for this project, so we won't be using too many nodes overall. Our first step to add our HDRI texture is to actually add the image. To do this, go down here to your shader editor on the bottom, and then hit Shift and A at the same time to bring up your ad menu. Now in the search bar, we can click Search, and then we'll type in environment. E N V should be enough to bring it up to the top of the list. We see here, environment texture, so we'll select this from the list, and then we'll place it over here to the left. Now drag from this color socket here on the new environment texture and plug it into the color socket here on the background node. For now, the scene will turn pink, as Blender is warning us that we don't have an image loaded yet. Now let's load our image, which is the HDRI image that I talked about earlier. To do this, we'll go over here toward says pen. Now navigate to wherever you saved your textures folder that you downloaded from the class resources. Don't forget to unzip the textures folder that I provided before you load the HDRI. If you're on a Windows computer, you can right click on the zip folder called textures, and then choose Extract A. Now navigate into the newly extracted textures folder. And then in here, we're going to choose sunrise EXR. The EXR file type is pretty common for HDRI images. So we'll select Sunrise and then choose open image. Now that we have our image loaded, we can see how much brighter our scene has become. This additional light will help us balance the shadows in our scene to give it a more vibrant look. We're not quite done with this HDRI yet, though, as we want to adjust the rotation of this image. This will allow us to change the direction of the sunlit lighting. To do this, we'll need two additional new nodes. Let's scroll out a little bit here so we can zoom out and see a little bit more to the left, and then we're going to hit shift and A to bring up our ad menu again, and then go to search, and first, we'll type in mapping. So MAP, and then right here we should see mapping. We'll choose this and then click over here to the left to place it. Then we add one more, so we'll add shift and A, bring up our ad. Quick search. This time we're going to type in texture, and then space C for texture coordinate, and then we'll choose that here, and then place it here to the left. Again, let's connect these nodes to the system. We're going to drag from generated here on the texture coordinate, and then place that into the vector socket here on the mapping. Then we'll drag from the vector socket here on mapping, and then place that down here and the vector socket for the sunrise D EXR. This mapping node that we added will allow us to change the rotation, the position, or the scale of our HDRI image. Our case will only be using the z rotation. The texture coordinate node that we added simply tells blender how to display our HDRI. The generated mode in this case works best for our purposes. Now let's adjust the z rotation on the mapping node so we can rotate the sun behind our character. We can find the z rotation here about halfway down the list on the mapping node. If you wanted to, you could simply just click and drag on this to use it as a slider, and we'll see as we rotate this. We can see that the lighting direction changes and it moves our shadows around the scene. However, for our case, I already know that a value of 274 looks the best for our render. We just click on this number and then type in 274, hit enter. We'll get the position that we'll be using for this class. If you're using Blender version 4.2 or newer, you want to use a value of 289 for the z rotation instead. This will help make our render a bit more similar to the 4.1 version. By rotating the light behind our character, we're getting some really nice shadows and illumination across the side of our character's face. We can see that here. We have some nice soft lighting here, but we're still getting some nice dark shadows across the front of the helmet, as well as down the front of the chest and on the side armor. Now let's zoom out a little bit here on our shader editor. Then the last change we're going to make is to change the strength here on this background node. Currently, it's set to one. The strength value here is what determines how bright this lighting is created by the HDRI image. If we increase this number, our lighting will become brighter, making our scene really blown out. And if we lower the number, the lighting will become dimmer, making the scene overall darker. For this class, we're going to set the strength here to 0.5. So we're going to have the brightness of this HDRI image. This is because we really don't need the full illumination that the HDRI is providing. It's more or less just there to support the lights that are already in the scene. We only want the lighting to fill the darkest shadows, but not remove them entirely. The value of 0.5 is just enough lighting to do this. With our lighting finalized, we have a couple of settings in the render properties to adjust. Before we do that, though, don't forget to switch the Shader editor back to the object mode instead of the world mode that it's on now. We can find that here on the left side, so we're going to click this drop down and then switch it back to object. This will allow us to see the material that's currently applied to whatever selected object we have. Now let's go over here to our render properties tab and make sure you're switched to that tab now. You can find it here with the backside of a camera icon, and then you should see the word render engine EV here at the top. The main thing that we want to adjust is our shadows. We can find the shadow settings down this list by twirling open the shadow settings. So we'll find those just by scrolling down until we see here shadows. If for some reason, yours isn't twirled open like this. You just need to click this little triangle next to it, and that will open it up so you can see the options. Our main goal here is to make our shadows as high resolution as possible, while also removing the soft shadows that don't work well with a stark anime style. The main reason this is important is we want to have the shadows in our scenes to have a very strong and distinct edge to achieve this retro look. Older animes would have simplified the lighting on their characters to make their animation process easier. So we're going to mimic this simplification and our render as well. So we have a few changes to make here. The first one is we're going to change our cube size from 512, All the way up to the maximum of 40 96, we'll change cascade size, again, all the way up to 40 96, we'll turn on high bit depth shadows, and then we'll turn off soft shadows. By adjusting all of these settings, we've increased the resolution of our shadows and remove their soft edges. This will help our lighting and shadows work with our retroesthetic rather than fight against it. To see an example of how these soft shadows work, if we zoom in here to the line on the chest, just by scrolling in on this image. We can see when we turn on soft shadows, it gives this kind of blurry edge, which in most cases works well for a more realistic render. However, in the case of trying to replicate a very hand drawn look, we actually want to get rid of these soft shadows, so it looks more like a straight pen line between two different colors, rather than this soft gradient between them that we have now. Again, make sure you have soft shadows turned off, and then all of these other settings here just made sure that these shadows are as straight and high resolution as possible. As of Blender version 4.2, the EV render engine we're using for this class has been completely overhauled, and most of the old settings no longer exist. For this reason, we'll need to change which settings we adjust to achieve sharp shadows. You also notice that your shadows and highlights don't 100% match the look of the video. This won't prevent you from following the class in any way, and you'll still be able to follow along with all the lessons with no problem. But your render will just look a little bit different by the end than mine does in the video. This is due to how the new version of EV handles lighting. There are two settings that we'll need to adjust to make sharp shadows, but I've already adjusted one of them for you. The first setting is still found underneath the shadow settings in the render properties panel like before. So on our right side, we should met in our render properties. Then we'll go down here to where it says shadows. We'll twirl this open. Then the setting that we need to change here is called Steps. We're going to click on this value here and then set this to one. Now you'll notice after you hit enter that your program might freeze for a second as it converts it down to one step. The setting here will limit the calculated steps per shadow ray to just one time. In simple terms, this will help get rid of some of the soft edges that we're seeing on our shadows. The last setting that I've already changed for you is found on the lights themselves. Even though I've already changed this setting for you, I will show you where it's at for your own personal projects. First, let's go up here to the outliner list and select any one of these lights. In my case, I'm going to select this main light here. Now we'll go down here and click on this green light Bowl icon for the object data properties. And then we're going to twirl open these shadow settings. The setting that we'll need to change is called the resolution limit, and it's found here at the bottom of these shadow settings. By default, this setting is typically set to 0.001. However, I've added an additional zero here to make this number even smaller. The smaller this number is, the higher resolution your shadows will be. Higher resolution shadows will remove some of the blurriness from the shadows and give us a sharper edge. For your own personal projects, you'd need to change this resolution limit on each light in the scene to achieve nice sharp shadows. This is because this setting is handled on a per light basis. With that last change made, we're ready to proceed to the next lesson. Don't forget to save your file, however, that way all of these changes we've made will proceed with you into the next lesson. You can do that simply by going up here to file and then choosing save or hitting Control S if you're on windows. In the next lesson, we'll add a sky texture to our scene. I'll see you there. Wait. 4. Creating the Sky Texture: In this lesson, we'll add a sky texture to our scene. Let's begin. With our lighting finalized in the last lesson, we're ready to begin working on the materials. I'm sure you've noticed by now that the sky behind our character is gray. Let's fix that by adding a painterly sky texture to help complement our anime. Start by switching to the shading workspace if you're not there already. You can find the shading workspace here by clicking on the shading tab at the top. Also, make sure that this top right viewport is set to the rendered mode. You can do that by clicking this far right button here. And again, if you can't see it, click on your middle mouse button to paint it to the side, and then click this button here. Now, let's select the sky plane object found over here on the right side inside this outliner, so we can just click the name here. Or we can simply click it here in the viewport to selected as well. With the sky selected, and we can now see the placeholder material that I have applied to it, which is currently just a sort of light gray material. Our first step is to add the sky image. To do this, we're going to hit Shift and A. Then go to search and type in the word image, IM AG then we can pick here image texture and place that over here to the left. Now, before we connect our image, make sure you go down here to the bottom of this principled BSDF node and make sure that this emission setting here is tolled open. It should already be tolled open for you because of the starter file when I saved it, it had it tolled open, but if for some reason, it isn't. Make sure it's open so you can see this color socket here. Now, click and drag from the color socket on the image texture. Over to the base color, and then again, drag from the same socket. So we're dragging a second lire out here to the emission color socket down here. Then lastly, set the strength which is currently set to zero. We're going to set this to one for the emission. I'll explain these two sockets here in just a moment, but for now, let's load our image. We'll do that by clicking the open button here on the image texture. Again, navigate to your textures folder that you've downloaded from the project resources. And then in here, we're going to choose the sky JP. So we'll choose that image and then hit open image. Now that we have our sky image loaded, we can actually see it behind our character. The reason we can see it is because we've connected it here to both the base color as well as the emission. Technically, the emission is not required. If I cut this cable here, so if I cut the wire by holding control and then right click dragging across this wire, it'll cut it, so it removes that connection. We can see now that we can see the sky back there, but it's really blown out. You can just barely make out the clouds here on the left side.'s because we've removed the emission socket here. When it's just plugged into the base color, that means it's showing the color on this plane, but also any light inside the scene is also being applied on top of that image. So far lighting is really bright, then it's going to really blow out the image. By adding it as well to the emission down here, we're making this plane self illuminated, we're essentially making this sky glow its own light. It's no longer being affected by the light in the scene. It's just showing the actual color of the image and it's emitting that light itself. Most materials, this isn't actually something you want unless you want your material to glow, such as these glowing eyes or the mouth. But in the case of our sky, we really don't want the lighting in the scene to affect the sky because that's not really how it works in real life. We're essentially making the sky glow by plugging it into the emission. We also changed our strength slider here by setting it to one, which makes the color on this emission the exact color of the image. One is the default value. If you set the strength value down to zero, which is what it was before, we're essentially just removing all the emission. Then if we increase this above one, we'd be making it even brighter than it normally is. As we raise this value, it starts becoming blown out again. So again, for our example, we're just going to leave this at one. Now that we're seeing clouds behind our character, let's fix how stretched out they look. To fix this stretching, we're going to be using the mapping and texture coordinate node that we used in the last lesson. I'm going to zoom out a little bit here. Move it over and then hit Shift and A. Go to search. Type in mapping, place that here to the left, and then hit Shift and A. Type in texture, space C, and then choose texture coordinate and place that here to the left. Now that we have our nodes placed, let's start connecting them together. Rather than using generated like we did last time, this time, we're going to use the window mode down here. We'll drag from Window and then place that here into vector, and now drag from this vector on the mapping node down into the vector on the sky p. By using this windowed mode here on the texture coordinate, we're disregarding the rotation and unwrap of the sky plane and instead telling blender to only look at the orientation of our window. This allows us to adjust the position and the size of the skyplane if we need to without affecting the position of the sky texture applied to it. Essentially, the texture is going to remain static, even if we move this object around, unlike a normal material. At this point, our sky is looking better, but we can use the mapping node to further improve the look of it. We're going to start by adjusting the scale of this image. To do this, we're going to go down here for the scale on the bottom of the mapping node, and we'll start by adjusting the y scale. So we're going to click this number here and then type in 0.68 and hit enter. This is going to stretch the image slightly vertically. We're going to remedy this vertical stretch so in just a moment. Now we can go to the x scale and click this, and then we're going to type in negative 0.47 from the hit enter. We've accomplished two important things with this change. First, we've fixed the stretch on the image by lowering this number and making the image wider. By adjusting these scales and making the number smaller than they were, we're making it repeat less in whatever direction we've typed in the number. And if it repeats less, then that means you'll see less of the image, but overall, it'll be a bit bigger. Second, by adjusting this x value here and making it negative, we've actually mirrored this image. With a positive number in the x scale, the sun is on the left side of the image, which doesn't actually make sense for our lighting. We want it to be on the right side. By making it negative and mirroring the image, we've changed the sun to the right side of the image, which makes a lot more sense for our lighting as it appears to have the lighting coming from behind the character here on the right rather than the left side. Now that we fix the size and the mirroring of our sky, let's get it to the correct position so that it makes for a nice background. First, let's zoom out a little bit here. Then we can move up by using our middle mouse button, clicking it into pan, and then we'll move to the location, and we're mostly concerned here with the x and the y. Now we can move our sky around just by simply clicking on the slider here and then sliding it left and right to find a position that we liked. We can also hold down shift while we click and drag here to make it move a little bit slower, so it's not quite so fast. In the case of our example here though, I already know two values here for the x and y that make for a pretty good background. So we're just going to type those in now. So we'll set the x value here to negative 0.24. And then for the y, we're going to set this to 0.13. These changes here have moved the sky down to the left a little bit. This perspective better matches the lower angle of our camera. We mostly see the sky behind the character, but there is a little bit of a landscape here on the bottom left. With that last change, our sky texture placement is finished. However, the colors feel a bit muted compared to the other colors in the scene right now, such as the red on the sword or the bright blue on the mouth and the eyes. Let's fix this by using a gradient overlay with some more vibrant blue colors. So we're going to start by zooming out here so we can see our full system at the bottom. Now we can hit Shift and A to bring up the add menu. Go to search. Then type in mix space C, and then we're going to choose mix color. Now you can drag and drop this node that we have attached to our mouse right now. On top of either one of these lines, you'll notice that when you hover over it, it's going to turn white letting you know that it's highlighted. I'm just going to drag it here on the top one. It's going to automatically connect the one that was highlighted. However, this other one is still bypassing it. To remedy this. We're going to zoom in here, and then we're going to drag from result down here into the emission again for the color, which means now that this sky image here is passing through this mixed node, and then it's pumping out the result to both the base color and then the emission color as well. This mix node here will allow us to combine two images together. In our case, we're going to overlay a blue gradient on top of our sky image to make it more vibrant. Currently, right now, though it's only overlaying this white that we see here in the B socket. Which is why our background here is a little bit more washed out than it was before. Before we add our gradient, let's zoom out here a little bit. Then we're going to drag select or top of these three nodes here. The texture coordinate, the mapping, and the sky, we're just going to move these up slightly. That way, they're not quite so close to this B socket, so we have more room to fill in at the bottom. Now let's begin adding our new nodes. We'll hit Shift and A. Go to search. This time we're going to type in gradient, GAD, and we can choose gradient texture. Place that here. And then, again, we're going to be making a new mapping and a new texture coordinate node. Shift A, mapping. Place this. And then one more time, Shift A, search texture space C for texture coordinate. We'll place that here to the left. Before we connect anything together, we do need to make a change to this mapping node. We're going to switch the type from point to texture instead. This texture mode here will allow us to actually affect the gradient texture. The point mode here doesn't work as well for the gradient texture node. Now we can begin connecting these together. Again, we'll use the window, and we'll drag this into the vector, and then we'll drag from the vector here on mapping down into the vector for the gradient texture. Then one more time, we're going to drag the color from the gradient texture to the B socket here, which is the second of the two images that we're going to be overlaying. To get a better idea of what this gradient texture is doing, we're going to adjust this factor slider here on the mixed node. We're going to set this all the way up to one, so we can just click and drag this and drag it all the way to the right, which will set it to one. And by doing this, we're telling this mixed node here to only display the B socket. If we had set this all the way down to zero, now we're telling it to only display the a socket, and we can see that reflected here at the top. By default, it's usually set to 0.5, which is an even mix of the two. It's half the a socket with half the B socket laid on top of it. But again, for our example here, let's set this all the way up to one, so we can see just what this gradient looks like. We should see here it's a black to white gradient. Now let's rotate this gradient so that it flows from the top to the bottom rather than left to right. To do this, we're going to go down to the mapping node that's plugged into the gradient texture. Not the top one. That one's only for the sky image. We're going to be using just the bottom one and we'll set this z rotation to 90. Nine zero, I enter, and now you can see that the gradient has rotated 90 degrees and now it's black on the bottom and white on the top. Now that our gradient is positioned correctly, we're ready to change the colors from black and white to a nice set of vibrant blues. To do this, we're going to need a new node. First, let's zoom out. This new node is going to be placed here between the gradient texture and the mixed node. I'm just going to move my gradient texture over a little bit to make some more room here. Now we can hit Shift and A, go to search. Then we'll type in color space R for color ramp. I'll choose color ramp here. Now we can just click and drag and place it here on top of this wire here, and that'll automatically connect it for us. This color ramp node that we just added is what's going to allow us to change the color and distribution of the colors on this gradient. This gradient texture simply generates a gradient for us. It doesn't allow us to change anything about it. Whereas the color ramp allows us to change both the colors as well as the position of these colors within the gradient. You can see here by clicking and dragging on these sliders, I can move where these colors start and stop. Let's start by changing the colors. To start with, click on this black slider here on the far left, and to make sure that it's selected, just click on this little tiny triangle here at the top. Sometimes it's a little hard to see if you don't zoom in, so you can zoom in here, click on that, and then you should notice that the color bar at the bottom is fully black. Now we can click on this black bar, then we'll be adjusting these values here on this color picker. If you're unfamiliar with this color picker, it's relatively easy to use. Right now it's set to completely black because all of these values here are set to zero. To start with, we can use just these dots here to adjust it. I'm just going to drag this right side here, which adjusts how dark or light the color is. I'm going to just drag it all the way up to the top. Then if I wanted to change the color really quickly, I can just click and drag on this little dot here and place it wherever I'd like to. You can see those sliders at the bottom are adjusting with wherever I place this dot. Normally, when I'm picking colors, I'll move this dot to roughly where I want it. Then I'll go down here and adjust these sliders to more fine tune these. You can see as I move these sliders that dot changes position to wherever I place it. In the case of our example here, I already know exactly which values I'd like for these numbers here, so we're just going to type them in. For our hue, we'll type in 0.58, and then enter for the saturation, we'll type in 0.71, and then for the value, and you can leave that at one. In case you don't already know, hue here is what changes the color, that slides it around the circle. Then the saturation here changes how vibrant that color is. Whether it's a little closer to white or if it's really, really colorful. I'm going to set my values back to what I had them at 0.58 and then 0.71. Okay, so that's our first blue color. Now if you just hover over the side here, that color picker will disappear. And this light blue color that we created here is going to be placed near the horizon, which is at the bottom of the image. This is to mimic the lighter blue that appears at the horizon on a sky, and then it gets darker as you look upward. So now let's make the darker blue, which is going to be on top of this white slider. So first, we need to select this white slider by clicking the little triangle here above it. We can see here it's switch to white. Now we'll click on this color bar at the bottom to change our color. Again, I'm going to be just typing in numbers here. So for our hue, click on this and set it to 2.6. Our saturation will set it to 0.94. Then for the value, we'll set this to 0.46. Now we have this darker blue color here at the top of our sky. With our colors finalized, let's adjust the position of this gradient so that it better matches our sky. We'll start with the slider that we already have selected, which is the far right or the dark blue slider down here at the bottom. Then we're going to go here to this position slider, which we can either click and drag to adjust it, which is also the same thing as just clicking and dragging the slider, or we can actually type a number in. For our case, we're just going to type the number in. So we'll type in 0.565 hit enter. And now we can select the left slider here, which is the light blue. And then for the position here, we're going to click on this and then type in 0.18 and then hit enter. By moving these sliders, we've moved these colors closer together and made the transition between them a lot more sharp. So, for our sky, we get a little bit more of a clear delineation between the top blue and the bottom blue. It's not quite so gradual. However, by moving them closer together, we've also created this dark line here on our sky. It might be pretty subtle in the video, but you might be able to see it on your own screen. Let's get rid of this dark blue by changing the gradient type. By default, it's set to linear. However, if we click this drop down here, we have a few different options. In this case, we're going to be using B spline. So we can select this now. And now we'll notice on our sky. It's a little bit softer than it was before, but we've managed to remove this dark line here that was in the middle. That's because in general, this B spline mode is a lot more soft than the linear mode is. Now that we have our gradient set up. The last thing we need to do is to blend it with our sky image. To do this, we're going to switch from the mix mode here, and we're going to set it to overlay instead. We can find overlay about halfway down the list here in the middle. Now we can see that our sky has inherited a lot of this blue color from our color ramp that we just added. That's because this blue gradient is being overlaid on top of our original sky image, making it a lot more saturated and vibrant than it was before. This overlay mode that we chose here is just one of many different blending modes. All of these different modes will combine these images together in different ways, and they work largely the same as other programs such as photoshop if you're familiar with them. We'll be using some of these other modes later on in this class. Now that we have a nice, vibrant blue sky gradient overlaid with our sky image, we have a much more colorful and saturated sky that works well with the other colors in our scene, such as the greens, the reds, and the blues on the character. In the next lesson, we'll create colorful anime style materials for our characters armor. I'll see you there. 5. Creating the Armor Materials: I lesson, we'll create colorful anime style materials for our character's armor. Let's begin. We're finally ready to add some materials to our character. So let's jump right in. These materials will all be very similar to each other, and we'll primarily just feature different colors in different amounts. We'll spend some time understanding the process on the first material, and then we'll practice this new knowledge a bit quicker on the next two materials. As usual, start by switching to the shading workspace if you're not there already by clicking on the shading tab here at the top. And then make sure this top right viewport here is set to the rendered mode, which is this far right button. Now let's click on this character's horned helmet by clicking here in the viewport to select it or by selecting helmet from here on the list on the right side. Now, let's um in here on our placeholder material at the bottom, and then to start our material, we're actually going to be deleting this principled BSDF node that we've had on the sky material. This node is useful for many types of materials. But in our case, it won't actually help our anime style material, so we can just remove it. To do that, we can just select this node and then hit Delete to remove it. Now let's add the three new nodes that are going to replace this principled B SDF node. Going from left to right, we're going to hit Shift A to add our new node, go to search. Then we'll type in Diffuse DFF. We're going to choose Diffuse BSDF Place that here to the left. Now hit Shift A, go to search. Type in Shader, space TO. We're going to choose Shader to RGB. Place that here. Then one more time, shift A search color space R, and then choose color ramp, and then place that here between these two. Now let's link all of these nodes together. We'll drag from this PSDF socket down to shader on the shader RGB node, drag from color down here to factor on the color ramp, and then drag from color to surface here on the material output. I'm just going to space these out a little bit, so they're not quite so cramped. Now that we have our three nodes added, let's discuss how they work together. First off, we have the diffuse node. This diffuse node is here just to give us a simple shader to start from. Technically, we could have used the principled P SDF node to do this. But the shader node is just a little bit more clean looking, so I prefer it for these anime style materials. All we really need is to just have a base color to start from. In this case, it's just this white color. Our next node, shader RGB is actually the most important one for the anime effect that we're after. By running our diffuse BSDF into this shaded RGB node, we're converting the shader information into color information instead. This might seem like an odd distinction, but it's actually really important. If we had left the shaded RGB node out of this material, we wouldn't be able to affect the colors and the light using our color ramp that we placed after it. That's because this color ramp here can only affect color information. By default, this diffuse B SDF node cannot output color information, so we need to convert it into color using the shader to RGB node. We can see here now it's outputting color on this socket, which we can then plug into the color ramp. This leads us to this color ramp node. This is almost as important as the shader to RGB node as this is how we'll be controlling the color and the placement of these colors on our model. We'll notice that if we click and drag either of these sliders, we can change the amount of light and dark on our model. This allows us to sort of break the true lighting in the scene, and for it to place the shadows in the highlights wherever we'd like them to be rather than where the actual light and shadow would appear. It will also allow us to have sharp breaks between each color just like an anime would. Now that we know a little bit about how these nodes interact, let's begin adjusting the color ramp to turn our characters armor into a vibrant green. I'm going to start by setting these sliders here back to their default positions, so far left and far right. And then our first change to this color ramp will be to get the separation in our colors nice and sharp. The sharp break between colors is the key to the anime or cartoon look that we're after. Luckily, for us, this color ramp has a gradient mode that makes this super easy. Again, we'll be using this drop down here to change it from linear, and then instead of Bast blind like we did last time, we're going to choose constant instead. You'll notice after making this change that the armor has turned mostly black with a small amount of white highlights. You'll also notice that we now have really sharp lines between these black and white colors rather than the soft gradient that we had before. You can see that here at the top of the helmet. This is exactly what we're looking for when we're using this constant gradient mode. Now let's get the positions of these sliders set up. First, with this white slider selected, so the far right one, we're going to set the position here to 0.66, which will move it further into the gradient and add more white to the texture. We'll adjust the colors in a moment. But for now, let's add another slider to our gradient so we can have three unique colors. In general, you'll want to limit your materials to having either two or three colors at most. Older anime and even some modern anime limits the amount of colors present on their characters to simplify the animation process. The more colors they have, the more they need to worry about the shading on the character, depending on the lighting. Which slows down the break neck speed and which enemy is produced in most cases. By limiting our color to no more than three variations, we're adhering to this real life limitation, and as such, retaining the look that we're after. Now with your white slider still selected, we're going to go over here to the top left and then click this little plus icon. This is going to create a brand new slider here between the two that we already have. Now let's select this new middle slider, which is here in the middle. And we're going to set the position for this one to 0.27, and then he enter. We can also go down here to this color bar at the bottom and just change it to any sort of medium gray for now, just as a placeholder. That way we can see the break between the colors. Now that we have our gradient separated how we like, we're ready to change the colors. We're going to start with this white slider here on the far right. So we're just going to click on this slider here and then go down here to the color bar. Select this to bring up our color picker. Again, I'll just be giving you values here to type in. For the hue, we'll type in 0.27 for the saturation. We'll do 0.55, and then for the value, you can leave that at one. We're going to make this a really pale green color that's meant to represent the highlights on our character's armor. Now we can select the next slider to the left, which is the middle one. So we'll select a little triangle, go down here, select the color bar. Again, let's type in some numbers. So for the hue, we'll type in 0.27 for our saturation, we'll type in 0.93. And then for the value, we can type in 0.8. This will be the main color for our armor and represents the mid tones of the gradient. Lastly, let's adjust this black slider here on the far left, which is going to be our shadow. So we have the black slider selected. Go down here to the color bar. For our hue, we'll type in 0.38, our saturation, we'll type in 0.73, and then for the value, we'll type in 0.4. You'll notice that for this shadow color, we've pushed our green color a bit more towards the blue direction. This is because we want to give our shadows the feeling that they are being illuminated by the blue sky instead of the warm sunlight because they're on the shadow side of the character. It's a relatively subtle change, but it helps vary the colors in our scene and give it a bit of a stylistic flare. With our colors finalized for the green armor, we're finally able to get the full effect of this anime style material. These flat colors with sharp breaks between them, give the model of really hand drawn anime vibe. One important thing to note about the colors we chose and their distributions on the gradient. We're trying to replicate a shiny painted armor for our character, so we have a lot of highlights, and the color is pretty close to white. If you wanted to have your armor look a little bit more like fabric instead of a painted metal, you would want to have your highlights be a little less prominent, meaning that there should be a little less of them, and the color should be closer to the middle color. So it doesn't appear as glossy. These are important things to think about when picking colors for your own projects. Now that we understand how this material was created, we can go a bit faster through the next two materials utilizing our new skills. The first step is going to be to copy the work that we've already created down here. We're going to drag select over top of these three nodes here. Then we're going to hit control and C to copy these. Then this will allow us to save some time by reusing these nodes for our next material. Now we can move on to the next piece, which is going to be the jaw armor here. We can select the jaw here or we can select it here from the list. Again, down here, we'll now see that we have the placeholder material for the jaw armor listed below. Our first step, just like before, is to delete this principle B SDF node. So we can select it here and then hit Delete to remove it. Now we can hover over the shader editor here at the bottom and then hit control and V to paste in the nodes that we copied from the last material. Let's move those over so they're not overlapping anything else. Then lastly, we're just going to connect this color here down into the surface for the material output. Now that we have this base to work from, all we need to do is adjust the colors and the positions on this color ramp node. You may have noticed that this material is already named purple, so that's the color that we're going to be changing our gradient to instead of the green that it is now. Now we can just go one by one on each of these sliders and adjust their positions and their colors. So we're going to start with the far right slider here, which is the light green. So we'll select this to make sure we can adjust the color down here. Click the color bar, and now we can type in for the hue, 0.65. Saturation is also 0.65, and then our value will set this to 0.6. Then lastly, for the position for the slider, we're going to set this to 0.5. So we're moving in a little bit further in creating more of this color. Now we can select the middle slider, which is this vibrant green. Click the color down here, and then for our hue, we'll set this again to 0.65. Our saturation this time will be 0.85, and then the value will be 0.62. Just like the last one, we are going to change the position, so we'll set the position for this slider to 0.3, a relatively small change. And now the far left slider here, which is our shadow color. Select the slider, select the bar at the bottom. Change the hue, 2.65. Change the saturation to 0.93, and then change the value to 0.56. As you can see, utilizing a previous material as a base for this one has really sped up our workflow. You'll also notice that the colors we picked for this material are a lot closer to each other. As such, look a little bit less glossy and metallic than the green material. It's important to include some variation in the perceived material types on your character to give it a bit more complexity and realism. But this purple material done, there's just one left to create. Let's select the body now. We can select it here in the viewport or we can select the body from the list over here on the right, can zoom out a little bit. Select the principled B SDF and delete it. Now again, we'll hover over the bottom, hit control and V to paste in those green nodes from before, move them over a little bit, and then we'll drag from color down here to surface. And now, this material is going to be orange. We need to change the colors, but we'll also be eliminating one of the sliders as well. We want this orange material to look a little bit more like fabric than glossy armor. We're going to remove the highlight slider and limit it to just two colors. This will simplify the shading and give it a softer look. Now, let's zoom into the color ramp down here and we're going to select the far right slider here, which is the highlight. Then we can just click this little minus button here, and that will delete that slider. So now it's just two colors. Now we can select this bright green slider here, which is currently the furthest right slider. Select the color bar at the bottom. Now we can change the hue. We're going to set this to 0.02. Go to the saturation, and set this to 0.96. Then for the value, we'll set this to 0.75. Now we can adjust the last slider, which is the shadow slider here on the left. Go down to the color bar. And then for the hue, we'll set to 2.01 saturation 2.93, and then for the value, we'll set this 2.48. Now, over here on our character, we can see that by eliminating the brightest color, we've made this feel a little bit more like fabric, such as they're wearing a shirt with maybe a piece of leather or something like that on the neck, and then a more metallic look here on the green metal. With this last material created, we're officially finished texturing our character. If you're curious how the other materials we didn't create during this lesson were made, you can select those objects and explore the materials yourself. If you were curious about this red sword, you could just click this sword here to see the material and how it's created and how the colors are distributed. If an object has multiple materials applied to it, such as the sword or the eyes, you can swap between those applied materials using the slot drop down here on the left. You would just click on this, and then you can see all three materials that are currently applied to this sword. If you wanted to see the silver material, you could just click silver from this list and you still have the sword selected, but now you're previewing the silver material that's applied to the sword. The same thing here, if you wanted to see the brown handle, you could see the brown here. You'll find in general, that the materials all use pretty much the same method as the three that we created in this lesson, with the exception of the blue eye material, which uses a solid emissive color to give it a slight glow. We can see that here by just selecting the eye. Go to the slot and then choose blue eye. You can see this material is much more simple and it's just using an emission node here to create a glowing blue effect. Because this blue color is solid, it matches perfectly fine with the other colorful materials in the scene. In the next lesson, we'll add line work on top of our render that gives the character a hand drawn look. I'll see you there. Ring ring ring winging. 6. Adding Freestyle Linework: In this lesson, we'll add line work on top of our render that gives our character a hand drawn look. Let's begin. At this point, all of our colors are in place, but we're still missing a pretty important aspect to our retro anime aesthetic, and that's the line work. To start this process, we'll want to switch to our rendering workspace. We can find that here at the top by clicking the word rendering. The line work method that we're using only appears after you've rendered your image, so we might as well do all of our work in that workspace. The very first step to this process is to simply render our image. We have two ways we can do this. We can either go up here and click Render and then choose render image, or alternatively, you can hit F 12 to quickly render your image. I would suggest you get used to using F 12 as it makes your life just a bit easier. I'm going to hit F 12 and then render my image. This process should be pretty fast on most computers as the EV render engine we're using is quite fast for simple renders like this. Now that we have our render visible, let's start adding some linework. We'll be adding this linework using a setting called freestyle. We can find the freestyle options at the bottom of the render properties tab. You can find the render properties here at the top right. Click this little icon here that looks like the backside of a camera, and then go down here and we'll see freestyle. You also want to twirl this option open if it isn't open already. To start with, we're just going to click this box here to turn one freestyle, and we won't adjust anything just yet. Now let's do another quick render by hitting F 12, and then we'll see here that it's going to apply the linework on top of our image. So we can see that it's added these little black lines here along the edges of our model. This is the very first step to making your character look like it was hand drawn. These lines are pretty thin right now. Let's increase the line thickness down here at the bottom rate from one pixel up to two pixels instead. We have some thicker and more noticeable lines. Now you'll notice after I changed the setting here, nothing has happened, and that's because every time you make any changes to these lines, you do need to re render the image. So we can hit F 12 to re render our image again to see these new thicker lines. Now that we have thicker lines, we're ready to start adjusting the shape and placement of them. We'll be adjusting the lines in the view layer settings. We can find that setting here under this icon that looks like three images stacked on top of each other. This is your view layer settings. If we scroll down here, we can see all of the free style settings underneath this larger freestyle section, and then there's a bunch of other subsections below it. We have a ton of options here that can change the look of our lines in many different ways. I won't be explaining all of these options in this class, as that could be an entire class on its own, but we will be using a few of them to improve the look of our lines. The first thing that we'll be adjusting is under the edge type settings. You can find those here near the bottom, you'll see a whole bunch of little check boxes here, and that's under edge type. These check boxes below are all the different ways that blender can decide where to place lines. We won't be using most of these. However, enabling material boundaries, we'll clean up some of the broken lines that we have right now by making sure that there is always a line between materials applied to the same object. We can find material boundaries here. It's a little bit cut off. But if you click on this, we'll enable the material boundaries option. This option is going to be the most noticeable on the eyes, the shoulders and also on the sword. Again, this material boundary option only works on materials applied to the exact same object. It's not necessarily going to create a line between this purple and the silver because these are two separate objects. But in the case of this sword, it's going to carry this line through all the way up through to the top and have a line between this silver and the red because they are the same object. Now that we have this option checked on, go ahead and do another render by hitting F 12. Now we can see again, this area here that I was just calling out on the sword now has a line that goes all the way up to the very top. Okay, so now that we have all the lines placed in the correct areas, let's start adjusting the shape of these lines. This is where we're really going to start getting into the more hand drawn look of the lines, so they don't look so robotic as they are now. One of the simplest changes we can make is the cap type. We can find this option under the freestyle strokes menu down here below this checkbox list. We'll to all open here, freestyle strokes. Then we can see here caps. We're going to switch this to the round cap type. Then we can just sum in on any one of these spaces here. Maybe I'll look at the top here, we can see the end of these lines right now come to a blunt end. They just come to a nice square end. But by changing it to round and then hitting F 12 to re render it, we'll see here now that instead of a square end, we have a nice round end. Which looks a little bit more hand drawn because that's how an actual pencil or a pen would create this line. It's a relatively subtle change, but it helps with the overall hand drawn look. Now let's move on to the two most impactful changes, which we'll find underneath the freestyle thickness settings. We can find that over here on the right side, so we're just going to scroll down until we see freestyle thickness, and again, you might need to roll this open. The main thing that we'll be doing in these settings is adding modifiers to adjust the line thickness. Let's start by adding the first one, which is called noise. To do this, we're going to click the ad modifier. And then choose noise from this list. Now let's scroll down so we can see the settings. Let's start by making some adjustments to these values and then I'll explain what they do. First, we're going to set our influence really low. We're going to set this to 0.07, and then go down here to the period, and we're going to switch this to 20 and then hit enter. With these changes made, Let's go ahead and hit F 12 to re render our image. Now the change that this has made should be relatively obvious right away. If we zoom into this line work here, we can see that rather than really consistent flat lines, instead, we have these wiggly, thicker and thinner lines across the entire model, which gives it a lot more hand drawn look. This changes the really robotic and straight lines that we had before into a more flowing and sketchy look that we like for this anime style. This noise modifier is adding variation to our line work by making parts of the line thicker or thinner than the base value of two pixels that we set in the previous settings. If we look at these settings over here, the influence value here is the overall strength of the effect. In our case, we want it to be relatively subtle, and a value of 0.07 keeps this effect manageable. You can see even with this relatively low value, we're still getting a lot of wiggly lines here on this model. So anything higher than 0.07 is just going to make this even stronger and might start making it look a little too sketchy. The amplitude here, which we didn't change, we just left at ten is how tall these changes are. So if you think of each of these changes as a peak on a mountain and a valley, it's changing how different are these peaks in these valleys, so it's making it more vertically different essentially. You can also think of this as just how strong the thickness changing effect is. Then lastly, we have the period, which is how far apart these thickness changes are. You can also think of this as the frequency if that helps makes more sense. So a higher value here for the period will make these peaks and valleys further apart. Smaller values will make them a lot closer and we'll make the lines look a little bit more zigzag or jagged. All of these effects add together to give us lines that are much more organic and hand drawn. We're trying to mimic the variations you'd see in these lines if they were created by a real ink pen by hand due to variations in the flow of ink or the pressure of the pen. Now that we have some variation, let's add some tapering to the lines so that they aren't all the same thickness throughout the entire stroke. We'll again be doing this using a modifier under the freestyle thickness settings. We'll go down here again and click Add modifier underneath freestyle thickness. This time, we're going to choose a long stroke, which is here at the very top. Let's scroll down so we can see the long stroke settings down here below the noise. Then the first thing we need to do is change the blend mode. Right now it's set to mix. We're going to switch it instead to multiply. This method tends to make your lines much thinner than you intend. Switching it to the multiply mode first will help retain some of that thickness you're losing by adding taper to the lines. Next, we'll change the mapping mode from linear to curve instead. Now we can scroll down to see this graph at the bottom. Changing from linear to curve, will allow us to change the shape of our lines and add a taper to the beginning and the end of the stroke. Now, let's adjust this graph down here at the bottom to make that taper that we talked about before. Start with, click on this line here in the middle. And that will create a new point that allows us to bend this line. We're going to move it all the way up here to the very top center. And then down here, you can see these values. So you want the right value to say 1.0, and then this left value here, we're going to type in 0.5, which ensures that this dot here is exactly in the middle, left and right, and then it's at the very top vertically. Now on the right side, you can see a tiny dot here at the top right corner. We're going to click and drag on this dot and move it all the way down here to the bottom right corner. So we're making this rounded hill shape. This graph that we just edited here, you can visualize as being the left and the right side of the stroke. The left side of the stroke is going to be very thin. The middle of the stroke will be its max thickness, and then the far end of the stroke will be as thin as possible as well. So I'll start thin, get thicker in the middle, and then it'll taper off to nothing again at the end. This helps mimic different pressures being applied to the pen as the animate artist is adding linework on top of the color. Now we can go ahead and render our image again one more time. So we can see the final results of these tapers. Now if we zoom in here, we can see in general, our line work looks a lot less robotic and generated. The line thickness variation and taper combined together to make a pretty convincingly hand drawn character. We can see examples of this tapering happening here on the sword, where the line gets really thin here at the end of the stroke and is much thicker further down. We can also see this taper effect here on the eye, where it's coming to a nice point at the end, as well as on the helmet here, where we're getting a nice break in the line, and it goes from much thicker down to almost completely gone, and then it gets much thinner down here. Overall, it just adds more variation in life to our render. In the next lesson, we'll begin our exploration of compositing effects in blender. I'll see you there. Way way way way. 7. Compositing: Color Correction: In this lesson, we'll begin our exploration of compositing effects in blender. Let's begin. A lot of the retro anime effects that we want for our render will be accomplished utilizing compositing effects inside blender. I've broken this compositing process down into eight mini lessons that explain each distinct effect that we're trying to achieve. These changes might seem really subtle or disjointed at first, but I'll ask you to trust me that by the end, they will all work together to give us the nostalgic retro anime look that we want. Smaller lessons will also allow you to return to the class and reference them individually in their own lessons. If you need a refresher in the future for your own projects. With that explanation out of the way, let's dive into our first effect. We're going to start by switching to the compositing workspace found here at the top directly next to the rendering workspace. We'll just click this tab here at the top to switch to this. I've already set up this workspace with a custom layout to make our lives easier. If you're interested in how this layout was created, you can learn how to create it for yourself and many of my other beginner classes. For now, let's render our image again so that we can see the current progress. Again, we can just hit F 12, and that we'll re render our image. In my case, I already had it rendered because I haven't closed my file since the last lesson. But if you're starting again after closing your file, you won't see anything on the right side until you render the image. And again, you can do that with F 12 or just going up to render and choosing render image. You should now see your render here on the right side. However, if it's missing, go here to this backdrop button. Turn it on, and then immediately turn it off. Now your render should show here above this node as well as over here on the right side. This compositing editor here on the left side works very similarly to the shader editor that we used in previous lessons. It uses nodes that pass their attributes from left to right. By layering these nodes, we can create complex effects that alter the look of our render. This is how we're going to achieve that complex retro look. Now let's begin the first effect for our render color correction. We'll be adjusting the colors of our render to make them less vibrant and contrasty to make them feel aged and degraded by older technology. Before we start, let's zoom out here on the left side. We're going to click and drag over everything here. These two nodes is including this little dot here. And we're just going to drag them over to the right to create some room. Now that we have some room created, we can add our new nodes. Let's hit Shift and A. Go to search. Then we're going to type in glare. GLA now you should see glare here. We'll click and place that here. We're just going to place it below this line for now. We won't automatically connect it just yet. Now hit Shift and A again. Go to search, and then type in RGB, and we're going to look for RGB curves. Let's use this. Again, place it just below the line to the right. Then lastly, shift and A. Search type in H E, and we're going to choose saturation value. Then again, place it here to the right just below the line. Now let's go through each of these nodes to get an idea of what they do and how they help our retro look. The first step is to connect our first node. We're going to drag from image down here into the image socket on the glare node. Then we'll drag from the image socket here at the end of the glare node on the right side. We're going to drag it to this little yellow dot here, which we'll then plug it into both of these nodes over here on the right. Don't worry about these other two nodes yet. We'll connect those later. Now, let's zoom in here to the glare node so we can get a better look at it. This glare node is typically used to add lens flares or bloom to your render. Bloom is just another name for the glow that surrounds bright light sources. We'll need to make some adjustments to this node to make it add a soft glow rather than the lens flares that we're seeing now in our image. Let's start that process now. First off, if we zoom in on our image, we can see what it's doing now, which is adding these kind of star light flares or a top of our image. To change it from the star light flare pattern to the glow that we want, we're going to need to change the mode. Right now, it's defaulted to streaks. We're going to click on the drop down here and then choose fog glow instead. Now we'll see after switching it to fog glow, those streaks are gone. We have a really subtle glow around the brightest parts of our image. This effect is also referred to as bloom, like I said before. Now we're going to need to lower this threshold value, significantly lower so that we get more glow across our image. This threshold value dictates what is bright enough in order to receive glow. The lower the value, the more glow is applied to the dimmer parts of the image. We don't have anything in our image that's super bright right now, so we'll need to lower this number to get a lot more of that desired glow. Now let's go to this threshold value, and we're going to lower it from one point instead to 0.1. By making our value so low, we're telling blender to apply the glow effect to almost our entire image. This might seem counterintuitive, but we really want to get this fuzzy and soft look for our image to lean into this retro look. We're going to further enhance this look by increasing the size of this glow effect. Right now, our size is set to eight. However, we're just going to increase it by one up to nine instead. And you can see here that the glow is even more prominent as the glow itself is larger. One thing to note about the size slider is that nine is actually the maximum. So it's kind of a weird slider. It goes from as low as six, which is the minimum. And you can see here it's really significantly lowered the amount of glow all the way up to a maximum of nine. So there's not a whole lot of choices here between the sizes, but you can see that each individual step makes a pretty big difference in the amount of glow on your image. Now that our glow is done, let's move on to our next node, so we can zoom out a bit. Now let's connect our RGB curves into the system. So first, we're going to drag from the image socket here on the glare and run it down into the image socket on the RGB curves. And then we'll drag from the image socket on the right side and drag it over here onto this dot so that it's routed into both of these nodes. This will be the first node that we're using to adjust the actual colors on our image. This RGB curved node is primarily used to adjust the light and dark values for the image. We'll be using it to clamp the bright values in our image and give the whole image generally a darker and less contrasty look. So let's select this top dot here. So the top right one, and we're going to slide it down until about 0.6. So we'll notice that here on the bottom right, we have values that we can type in. Now, if we click this, we'll see that it's not actually 0.6, it was hiding a lot ofthose numbers. So we're just going to type in 0.6 hit enter. You want to make sure that this value here is set to one because you want to make sure that this dot here is touching the far right side. We're only interested in lowering the y value, which is the right one, and we're going to keep the x value here set all the way to one. You might have noticed now that our image is a bit darker. So you don't have to follow along with this part, but if I just move it back up to the top, we'll see how much brighter our images. In this case, we're just trying to lower the contrast of our image by making the highlights a bit darker. Again, I'm just going to type in 0.6. That way, it's the value needs to be. Now, lastly, we need to hook up this hue saturation and value node. So we'll drag from the image socket here to the image socket on the hue saturation value. Then again, drag the image here to this dot, so it routed into both of these. Now we can zoom in here to get a better look. This hue saturation value node does pretty much exactly what it sounds like. It allows us to change any of these three aspects of our image by adjusting these sliders. We're only going to be changing the saturation of our image by lowering it down to 0.95. If we go to saturation and type in point, nine five. We'll see here that we've lowered the saturation of our image just a little bit to give it a bit more of a washed out look. Again, this step is to mimic the lower quality of older televisions and helps add to that retro look of the image. We won't be adjusting any of the other sliders for our image, but one that you might find interesting is the hue slider. By using the slider, you can shift all the colors in the image along the hue scale, which is what determines the colors. This is a way that you could get a unique and slightly alien look for your image if you wanted to slide the colors a bit left or right on the scale. For now, however, we are going to leave ours at the default, which is 0.5. That way, our colors remain as we wanted them. As a final step, let's organize these nodes that we added into a frame. This will allow us to keep our nodes organized and at a little label so that we know what effect they accomplish in the future. So first, let's zoom out. Then let's pack these nodes together so that they're relatively well organized. We don't want them overlapping or anything, but just get them nice and close together. Now we can drag select over top of these three nodes, and then we'll hit n to bring up our side menu. Now that we have the side menu up, we're going to hit control and J to put a frame around these three selected nodes. And that's shown here with this black box that sits behind them. Now when I select this black box, if I move this, it will move the entire grouping together because they're all part of the same frame. Now on the side menu that we brought up, make sure you're on the node tab here, and then for the label, we can type in anything we'd like. In this case, we're going to type in color correction and then hit enter, and now we'll see the color correction label here on this frame. That way, later on, if we're looking through this again, we don't have to wonder what these nodes we're doing. We know that any node that's inside this grouping here is responsible for color correction. Now we can hit N to hide the side menu again until we need it later for another grouping. With these few nodes adjusted and our node frame made, we've successfully corrected the colors and values in our image to give it a more retro look. In the next lesson, we'll continue our compositing mini lessons with pixellation and smoothing. I'll see you there. Way 8. Compositing: Pixelation and Smoothing: In this lesson, we'll add some pixelation and smoothing to our render. Let's begin. It might seem counterintuitive to pixelate our image. You might be thinking, don't we want our image to look as good as possible. And in this case, you're not wrong, but good in our case is relative. A good retro anime image mimics the technical limitations of the time to achieve a believable retro. For our image, that means lowering the resolution to mimic the resolution of an old CRT television. In theory, you could just lower the output resolution of the render. But rendering the image at a full resolution and then lowering it with compositing effects gives it a lot more control. We'll start with pixilaating our image. Then we'll move on to the smoothing process that brings it all together. Before we begin, make sure that you're in the compositing workspace and you've rendered your image recently. You can find the compositing workspace here at the top, next to the rendering tab, and then you can render your image by hitting F 12 on your keyboard or by going over here to render and then choosing render image. When your render finishes, you should see the image over here on the right side. If for some reason you don't see your render over here and you have rendered the image, go over here to the backdrop button, Turn it one, and then turn it off again. Okay, so let's add our first new node. We're going to hit Shift and A to bring up the ad menu. Go to search. Then we're going to type in Pix then we'll see here Pixelate, we'll choose this. Then we're going to drag it down here and place it on top of this wire here when it turns white. I just want to make sure that's placed after the color correction grouping that we made in the last lesson. Now let's zoom in here to get a better look. We can see the settings here for the pixilate node. As you can see, there aren't really many settings. It's basically just one slider here. We'll be using this new pixilate node to lower the resolution of our image to just one third of its starting resolution. This will get it a lot closer to the actual resolution of an old CRT television. To pixelate our image, we're just going to type in the number three here for pixel size, so we'll change it from one and then hit three instead. This will make our pixels three times larger and make the resolution of the image appear three times lower. It's a relatively subtle effect overall, especially on the smaller version of our image. But if we zoom in here to the front of the head, and we set this back to one, we can see what the original resolution looked like. In this case, every line here is relatively smooth and it's all pretty cohesive. Now if we set our image back to three for the pixel size, we can see now we're getting a lot more jagged lines here and the image overall looks lower resolution. Now that we have our image pixilated, it looks a lot older due to the lower resolution. However, something isn't quite right yet. We'll notice that the pixilated effect has created square edges on each of our pixels. This is what's causing this zigzag or stairstep look here on this block line. This all makes sense for a low resolution modern image. However, CRT television didn't have modern pixels. It had vertical elongated pixels that had rounded edges. We're going to add two nodes that help smooth the edges of these pixels and make them a little smoother and more round. While this won't recreate the exact same effect as a CRT television, at least gives the impression that it's not a modern screen. To begin this process, let's zoom out here over here on the left. We're going to click and drag over the last two nodes as well as this little reroute node, and we're just going to drag them over to create some room for these new nodes. Now let's hit Shift and A to bring up the add menu. Go to search. We'll first type in blur, BLU R, and we'll choose Blur. Then for this one, we're just going to place it below the line. Then second, we hit Shift and A, go to search. And then we'll type in Kahara K. That should be enough to bring this to the top of the line. And we want this here called Kahara. Again, we'll place this below. For now, let's only hook up the blur node, and we'll be placing that after the pixelate node. We'll explain Kuhara in a moment. To hook this up, we can just click and drag this blur node and place it directly on top of this line. That will automatically connect it to the system. Our first step to smoothing these pixels out is to simply just blur the image slightly. We'll be doing that with this blur node. This is going to soften the edges of the pixelation effect that we just added. To blur our image, we'll just go down here to the bottom of the blur node, where it says x and y, and we're going to set both of these to four, so you can go to each one of them, type in four and go down to the last one. And then if you didn't know this, you can also click and drag across the top one and drag down to the lower one to change both of them at the same time. You have to do it relatively quickly. But if I click and drag and hold on top of the X and then drag down, you can see here I've highlighted both of them. So it allows me to adjust not just the one, but if I click and drag, I can adjust both of them at the same time. But again, we're going to set both of these to four. Such a slightly blur image. Now we can see on the right, that we've slightly blurred these pixelation effects, but we haven't completely removed them. There's still pretty obvious that the image underlying this blur effect has somewhat of a jagged edge. And now we're ready to use the Kuahara node. First, let's move this up to organize them slightly, and then we're going to drag the Kuahara on top of the wire right after blur to automatically connect that to the scene. You can see right away after connecting this that our image has changed pretty dramatically. The Kuahara node is used to mimic a painterly feeling for your image. At high values, it makes your image almost look like an oil painting. We're going to be using a much more subtle effect, however. We can see here at a size of six, our image is starting to lose a lot of detail and has, like I said, almost a painterly look. The higher you make this number, if I turn this all the way up to say 20, and I let the effect process here, you can see our image is pretty dramatically changed. Now, this is great for other types of stylized effects, but it doesn't work very well for the effect that we're after. For our situation, we actually only want to set this to a value of one. We can see here after turning it to one and zooming in on our lines. Our lines have a pixilated look, but the edges of them have all been rounded off thanks to the blur, as well as the uahara affecting the blurred image. We're getting these pixelated edges. You can see this has a vaguely blocky look, but each of these blocks has a rounded corner on it. This has overall really softened the pixilation on our image and made it look more like a CRT television. With this final adjustment made to the pixelation. We're ready to add all of these here to a group. So we'll drag select over top of these new three nodes, Pixelate, blur and Kuahara. Then we'll hit Control and J, add them to their own frame. Now we can hit n to bring up the side menu. Make sure we're on the node tab up here, and then for the label, we're going to type in the name pixilation and smoothing, and then hit Enter. Now we can hit N to hide the side menu. In the next lesson, we'll add some color bleed to our render, then combine all of these effects together into one. I'll see you there. Way way way way way way. 9. Compositing: Color Bleed and Mixing: We green green green. In this lesson, we'll add some color bleed to our render, then combine all of these effects together. Let's begin. We have our colors corrected and the images appropriately pixelated. Our next step is to add some blurring between these colors. We'll achieve this by blurring a copy of our image horizontally, then overlaying it on top of itself to add some bleed between these colors. This is another effect and a long list of effects that we'll add to imply a low fidelity and aged look to our render. As always, with these compositing lessons, make sure you're in the compositing tab, and also make sure that you've rendered your image recently. By either hitting F 12, we're going to render image. And then you should see your image here on the right side after it finishes. If not, go up to backdrop, turn it on, and then turn it off and your image should pop up here. Now, let's jump right in with some new nodes. To start with, zoom in slightly and then drag select over the last two nodes plus the dot and then drag them over a little bit to the right to make some room. Now we can hit Shift and A. Let's bring up the ad menu. Go to search. Then this time, we're going to type in directional. So DRE. That should get you close enough to see directional blur, and we'll place that down here. Now shift A again, go to search, type in blur BLR. We're just going to get the regular blur node. Place that after the directional blur. Then lastly, we'll hit Shift and A. Go to search. This time, search mix Mix and choose mix color. And we're going to place that up here near the top. This effect is only really visible when combined with the base image. Let's get our mixed node set up now. We'll remember the mixed node from when we combined our sky image with a blue gradient. We're doing something similar here with the final render. To start with, we can zoom in here to the mixed node, and we're just going to drag this on the line after Kuahara. We'll click and place that here, and that will automatically connect it for us. Don't worry about your image disappearing for now. We'll be fixing that in just a moment. Now on the bottom two blur nodes that we added. We're going to click and drag over these, move them slightly to the left so that they're more lined up with this grouping here. Now we can click and drag from image on directional blur down to the image on the regular blur. So here to here, and then we're going to plug in the image from the blur node into the bottom image socket here on the mix node. And then the last connection is over here all the way on the left. We're actually going to click and drag on this render layers and move it down so that it doesn't intersect with anything else. And then we're going to drag a line here from the image socket on the render layers and plug it in down here on the directional blur. If you're having trouble seeing both of these sockets at the same time, you can always zoom in slightly, so it's easy to see one of them, then click and drag and move your mouse to the edge of the frame here, and you'll notice that it starts scrolling it wherever your mouse moves, and then here you can just plug it in. That way, it doesn't have to be quite so small when you're plugging these sockets in. Now the reason that we decided to bypass all of these things here at the top and run this line directly from the base image down to this directional blur is that this effect is relatively subtle. So we want to start out with the most saturated and colorful version of our image, which happens before this color correction. If we didn't bypass these two groupings here, we would actually be blurring the more desaturated, lower contrast and pixilated image on top of the image itself. The blurring color effect would be a little less noticeable. Now let's go back over here to our mixed color mode. We're going to zoom in here, we're going to switch this mixed mode here from this dropdown, and we're going to instead choose color. This color blending mode will overlay only the color information from the blurred version on top of the pixelated image. This is important because we're only interested in getting some of the bleed between the colors, not overlaying a blurred version of the actual image on top of each other. And the last change for this mixed color node is going to be changing the factor slider from one down to 0.2 to make it a lot more subtle. That means this blurry version is only laying on top of the image at about 20% opacity. With our mixed node set up, we can zoom out here, and then go down here to the bottom where we have our blur nodes. Our first step is to adjust the directional blur. So we're going to go through here, change a bunch of these settings, and then we'll go through them one by one and give you a rough idea of what it was that we actually changed. So let's start at the very top here. And we're going to set our iterations to ten instead of one. For the center values, we're going to switch the x to one, and then the y to zero. Then lastly, for the distance, we're going to set this to 0.009. You may notice after making these changes that your image takes some time to update, and you'll see a progress bar down here showing how long it roughly it's going to take to composite the rest of the image. Depending on the speed of your computer, this compositing process may be faster or slower. Now let's go through some of these settings that we changed to get a better idea of what we did to the image. First up, we have the iteration slider that we changed. This slider changes how smooth the blurring is. The higher the value, the smoother the blurring effect is. Given the level of blur that we need, ten iterations works fine. Next up, we have the center sliders broken into the x and the y. These sliders change which direction the blur is occurring in. By limiting the effect to only the x direction, we're telling blender we only want our blur to happen horizontally and not vertically. This horizontal blur is meant to mimic the scan line effect of a CRT television. Old TVs used to update the image using horizontal bands of color that would transition the TV from one frame to the next. Depending on the speed of this refresh, you could sometimes see horizontal blurring on the frame on particularly fast movements. This is the effect that we're mimicking with this horizontal blur effect. Lastly, we have the distance. This value here simply controls how strong the blur effect is. Higher numbers produce a stronger blur. It's a pretty strong slider, so we really only need a pretty small value to achieve the level of blur that we want. In our case, a value of 0.009 was enough to achieve the level of blur that we wanted. Now that we have the horizontal blur taken care of, let's add an overall blur to this image overlay to further increase the bleed between colors. We're going to do this by increasing the x and the y values on this blur node here. All we need to do is change this x and the y both to 25. So we can do that now. Now with this directional blur blurred by the blur node, we've softened the horizontal blur effect that we added before and increase the level of bleed between each of these colors. With this last change made, let's quickly organize our file. So first, we'll drag select over the bottom two blur nodes here, hit Control and J. Then hit n to bring up the side menu. Go to the node tab, and then for the label, we'll type in Color bleed. And then before we hide this side menu. We can go up here to the single mixed color node. We'll drag select over this, hit Control J to add it to its own frame, and then we're going to call this combine color corrections, and then hit enter. This last frame here is somewhat unnecessary as it's only housing a single node. However, it does allow us to label what this node is doing. So I'm still going to include it. Now we can hit n to hide the side menu. This color bleed effect that we added adds some interesting effects such as the red from the sword, blurring here on top of the helmet. As well as the blue from the sky and the green from the helmet mixing together to create this somewhat of a white halo around the front of the head. This is an important, if not relatively subtle effect to achieve the retro look that we're after. In the next lesson, we'll add our first overlay to make our render look like it's being displayed on a CRT television. I'll see you there. 10. Compositing: CRT Overlay: In this lesson, we'll add our first overlay to make our render look like it's being displayed on a CRT television. Let's begin. Our next few lessons will all be relatively similar because each one will focus on overlaying a different image on top of our render to achieve a new effect. All of these overlay images have been provided in the textures folder that you downloaded from the project resources. Our first overlay will add a subtle indication of the CRT pixel pattern to our image. Before we begin, as always, make sure you're in the compositing tab, and you've rendered your image recently and it's shown here on the right side. Now, let's make some room for our new nodes. Over here on the left side, we're going to click and drag over top of the last two plus the dot and then move them over to the right. Now we can hit Shift and A to bring up our ad menu, click Search, type in image. Place that here to the left. Shift A again, search, and then we'll type in blur, and then one last node, shift a search, and then we'll type in mix color and we'll place that here. Now let's zoom in down here to this image node that we added. We're going to click on this open button here, which is the little folder icon, and then you'll want to navigate into the Textures folder that you downloaded from the project resources. This is the same place that we took the sky image from, as well as the Sunrise HDRI. The image we'll be using this time is CRT pattern underscore four x three. I'll choose this and then click Open image. As a side note, you can avoid having to create the image node by simply dragging it directly into this editor from a file browser. If I just move my file browser here and then click and drag from this image and drag it over here, We'll automatically create the image node and load that image into the image node. Either method works, but if you'd prefer just a drag and drop, you can do that as well. I'm going to delete the second version as I won't need both of them. Now let's link all of our nodes together. First, we're going to drag from the image socket here down to the image socket on the blur. Then we'll drag from the blur to the bottom image socket here on the mix node. Then we can drag from the combined color corrections mix node over here. Into the top image socket on the new mix node. Then lastly, we're going to click the output image socket here and place it on this dot here, which is the re route, which plugs it into both of these nodes. I'm going to quickly give this a little bit more room here just so they're not quite so cramped and just organize them so they're a little bit more tidy. Now without making any adjustments to these nodes, we can look over here on the right side to see that our image has been replaced with this image. If we zoom in here, we can see what the pattern on a CRT television typically looks like. These red, green, and blue blocks of color are the equivalent of pixels on a CRT television. The images on old televisions like this, were created by lighting up different combinations of red, green, and blue to create the colors for the image. We'll be overlaying this pattern on top of our render to give a subtle indication of these pixels. Let's start by getting our mix node here set up. So we can zoom in a little bit here so we can see this node. To start with, we're going to switch it from the mix mode, and we're going to change it instead to darken, which is just below mix here. Lastly, we're going to change the factor 1-0 0.25. So we're lowering it to about 25% of its normal opacity. Now if we zoom out a bit on our image, we can see that we have this pattern overlaid on top of the image. We want a pretty subtle blending mode for this effect as we only want the indication of these pixels, we don't want them dominating the image. The darkened mode works well for this, and setting the factor to about 0.25 also ensures that this effect isn't too strong. Even with these relatively subtle values here, we can still see it pretty clearly on top of our image. The last thing we're going to do is blur this pattern here slightly to get rid of some of the hardest edges caused by this darkened blend mode. We can do that by just changing the x and the y value on this blur node to two instead. This wide of roughly two pixel blur here to this image just to soften it up just a little bit. And that's it for this pretty simple effect. So at this point, let's drag select over top of these three nodes here, hit Control and J, to add them to a frame it N to bring up the side menu. And then for the label, we'll type in CRT pattern overlay, then hit Enter. Now we can hit N to hide the side menu. And then you can position this frame wherever you'd like to make sure that none of these lines overlay each other and make it look too cluttered. Our first CRT image overlay is done. However, we have quite a few more to add to the full render before we're finished. In the next lesson, we'll add a noise overlay to our render to give it a low fidelity look. I'll see you there. A way way way way way. 11. Compositing: Noise Overlay: In this lesson, we'll add a noise overlay to our render, to give it a low fidelity look. Let's begin. Our last overlay applied the CRT television's pixel pattern to our render. This time, we're going to add a noise overlay that we'll not only vary the values and the colors on our image slightly, but also give our virtual TV a bit of static in the signal. This effect should add the low fidelity and slightly degraded image quality we're looking for in this retrosthetic. We'll again need three new nodes for this effect. So let's add them now. Before we add them, Let's move over here, drag select over the last three and then drag them to the right to make some room. Now we can hit Shift and A. Search, we'll add an image, place that here, shift and A. Search and add a scale. Then lastly, shift and a search, and then another mix color, and we'll place that over here. As another reminder, you can simply drag the color noise image from the textures folder into this editor to save yourself some time. If you decided to make the image node manually like I did here, first click on this open button here, then navigate to the textures folder, and then choose color noise here at the top, and then click Open image. Now we can connect all these nodes together. So we'll drag from image to image on the color noise to the scale. And then quickly before we connect the scale to this mixed node, we're just going to drag the mixed node here on top of this wire so that it automatically connects its here. And now we can drag from the scale to the bottom image socket here on the mixed node. We'll again see that due to this mixed nodes default settings, we can see our overlay image here on top of the render. This isn't a bad thing, though, as it lets us zoom in to see what this noise actually looks like. The noise pattern we added simply adds a random color pixel across the entire image. This accomplishes the static effect that we want and a subtle variation to the color on individual pixels. One thing we will want to do though is increase the size of this noise. This isn't mandatory, but I think it looks a little bit nicer when the pixels aren't quite so small for the CRT style image. We'll use the scale node that we added to do this. All we need to do is zoom in on the scale, and we're going to change both the x and the y to a value of three instead. So I'll make it three times larger. This also has the added benefit of softening the noise pattern slightly and making these color blocks closer to the size of our CRT pixel pattern. Now let's get our mixed color node set up so that it blends with the underlying render correctly. We're going to switch it from the mix mode instead to the screen mode here, and then for the factor, which is essentially the opacity of it. We're going to set this 2.01, which is a very, very low value. We want a really subtle effect for this noise overlay, so it's not too distracting. The screen mode allows the colors and the light values to show up nicely, and the really low factor value ensures that it doesn't distract too much from the image quality. If you want a stronger static effect, all you need to do is increase this factor. I say I set this 2.2. We'll see that the static on the screen here gets much, much stronger. If you wanted a really staticy television, this would be the way you could do it. But for ours, I'm going to set it back down to 0.01 and then leave it there. As always, let's organize these nodes here into their own frame. I'll just drag select over the bottom two here. Move them up so they're not quite so spread out, now that they're more compact. I can drag select over all three, Control J, hit n then we'll call this noise overlay, Enter and then hit N one more time to hide the side menu. Now we can move it closer to the last frame, so it's a bit better organized. With our noise set up, we'll now notice slight variations in the color across the swathes of flat color that we had before. It's particularly noticeable in the dark materials that we have on the face, and especially around the mouth here. See all these variations in color and also brightness and darkness here in the shadows. In the next lesson, we'll continue to accentuate the retro look of our render with a CRT banding overlay. I'll see you there. 12. Compositing: CRT Banding Overlay: We green. In this lesson, we'll continue to accentuate the retro look of our render with a CRT banding overlay. Let's begin. It's time to add yet another overlay for a retro anime render. This time we're replicating a phenomena only seen when you take a picture or a video of an old CRT television. The dark bands in this reference photo are caused by the camera taking the picture, not being synced with the refresh rate of the CRT television's electron gun sweeping to update the image. Basically, in simple terms, it means that you're seeing something that you're not able to see with your own eyes due to the camera interpreting these visuals in a different way than we do. To further add to the retro effect of our image, we're going to be mimicking these dark bands. As always with these mini lessons, make sure that you're on the compositing workspace, and you've recently rendered your image, and you can see it here on the right side. Now let's start the process of adding these new nodes. First, we're going to zoom in a little bit here. Drag select over these last three things here, and then move them over to the right to make some room. Now we can hit Shift and A. Go to our ad menu, choose search, and I'm going to type in image. But again, if you don't like doing the two part process of bringing in the image node, you can instead just drag the image directly in. In this case, we'll be using CRT banding dot JPEG. But for me, I'm going to choose the image node, place it down here, and then shift A again, search and we'll search mix color and we'll choose the mixed color node and place it here to the right. As usual, let's get everything hooked up. We'll start by dragging this mix node directly on top of this wire. That'll automatically connect it for us. Over here, we can drag the image node down here into the bottom image socket. Then we're going to click the open button here. Again, navigate to the textures folder that you downloaded from the project resources and then choose CRT banding JPEG then click open image. This effect is a bit more simple than previous overlays as it only requires us to adjust the mix node. Before we do that, though, you should have a pretty good view of what this overlay is actually doing. We're overlaying black on the top and the bottom of the image to darken it. Then we have a bright white band, about two thirds of the way up with a little bit of red and blue on the edges of the band. We're not only darken the top and the bottom, but also add a little bit of red and blue for some added color just like the reference image we looked at before. Let's get the mixed mode set up now, now that we know what this image is actually doing for us. We're going to change it from the mixed mode here on the drop down to instead the multiply mode. The next we'll set the factor from one down to 0.5. Multiply blend mode that we chose will only allow the darker parts and the colors to overlay on top of our image. That means that the black on the top and the bottom, as well as the slight blue and slight red that we had are the only things that are visible. Anything that is pure white is essentially made invisible by the multiply blend mode, so it's not affecting the image at all. This area here in the middle where the white band is is basically exactly what it looked like prior to this overlay. We're also using a value of 0.5 for the factor to make sure that the overlay isn't too dark on our image. Obviously, our effect is much more subtle than the reference image that we looked at earlier. But this is so we can give the indication of banding without totally obscuring our image. If you want a stronger and more realistic effect, feel free to increase the factor value, if you want it to be more pronounced. Something maybe in the 0.8 range might look good. But you'll notice as you increase this factor value, the top and the bottom of the image start to become pretty obscured, so the image definitely takes on a more degraded look. For now, I'm going to set mine back to 0.5. Okay. So I'm sure you already knew this was coming, but let's get our nodes organized into a frame. So I'm going to zoom out here a bit. Move these notes a little closer together so they don't take up quite so much room. Then I can drag select over both of them. Control J to put them into their own frame. Hit N, bring up our side menu. And then for the label, I'm going to type in CRT banding and then hit Enter. Now we can hit N to hide the side menu. And then I'll just organize it over here by moving it closer to the other frame. With another overlay added in a long line of other overlays, we're inching ever closer to our perfected retro anime aesthetic. In the next lesson, we'll add a dark vignette to the edges of our image to mimic a rounded CRT television screen. I'll see you there. 13. Compositing: Vignette: In this lesson, we'll add a dark vignette to the edges of our image to mimic a rounded CRT television screen. Let's begin. This is it. Our last overlay image. This time, we'll be adding a vignette overlay to darken the edges of the render. This will help simulate the lower illumination present on the edges of a curved CRT television screen. Without further delay, let's add this last overlay. So we're going to zoom in here. Okay. Drag select over this last grouping as always, move it over to make some room. Now we can hit Shift and A, go to search, and then choose image. Or alternatively, you can just drag in the vignette image from the textures folder. So I'll choose image and then shift A one more time. Search mix and choose mix color. Now let's zoom in here and get these nodes connected. So we're going to zoom in. Drag this mixed node on top of the wire here, automatically connect it, drag our image into the bottom, and then click open, navigate to our textures folder, and then choose CRT vignette. And then click Open image. This overlay image is pretty self explanatory. It darkens the edges of the image while leaving the center in white, making it pretty much untouched. The only thing we'll need to do is adjust the mixed node. So we can zoom in here. Again, for this one, we'll be choosing the multiply mode, and then we're going to set the factor to 0.7. Just like last time, the multiply mode will only overlay the dark parts of the image and leave the middle white part of the vignette pretty much invisible. This works great for only darkening the edges of the frame. A factor value of 0.7 ensures that the edges are dark without being fully black. If you'd prefer the edges to be a bit darker, simply increase this factor up to something maybe 0.9. I would avoid going all the way up to one, but a value of 0.9 will increase the darkness quite a bit. But for our image, I'm going to leave it at 0.7. Again, this was a relatively quick overlay. So we're basically done at this point, we just need to add these to a frame. So we're going to zoom out, move them a bit closer to each other, drag select or both, Control J, hit, go to label. And then this time, we'll just type in VG, and then hit Enter. With that done, we can hit N to hide the side menu. Then we can zoom out a bit, and then just move this frame next to the other. With this last overlay image added, we're just about done with the compositing. In the next lesson, we'll finalize our render with some lens distortion and then save our final image. I'll see you there. A winging. 14. Compositing: Lens Distortion and Final Render: In this lesson, we'll finalize our render with some lens distortion and then save our final image. Let's begin. We've made it the last compositing effect before we save our final render. This time, we're not overlaying an image, and instead we're processing our image through a node called lens distortion. Let's add this new node to the very end of our system so we can filter the entire render up to this point through the effect. So we're going to zoom in here at the very end. And then you're only going to need a small amount of space here because it's a single node. Just make sure you have at least this much space and then we'll hit shift into A. Go to search. This time, we'll search Lens LEN S and then choose lens distortion. Then we can place that here after the vignette, but before these last three nodes. Now, let's zoom in on this new lens distortion node so we can get a better look at it. We're going to accomplish two main effects with this node, and they both revolve around using these sliders here at the bottom. Our first effect is distorting the image so that the center of the image appears to come towards us and the corners appear to push away from us. The subtle effect will help sell the curved screen that CRT televisions used to have. To do this effect, we're just going to go down here to where it says distortion, and we're going to type in 0.01 and then enter. This effect is pretty strong, so we only need a really small value here to get the effect that we're after. Now if we zoom in on the corners of our image, we can see here that the corners have been pushed away and they're actually pulling away from the edge of the image. If we zoom out here and look at the middle, it's a little harder to tell in the center because there's nothing to really reference it against, but the center of the image has actually been brought towards us, so it's slightly bulging in the center. It's kind of pushing out towards us, making the whole image, making the whole image look convex. If you want your screen to look more curved and distorted, a higher value here, we'll do that for you. Or if you just wanted to see what this effect looks like in a less subtle format, instead of 0.01, you could type in 0.1. Now this is probably much too strong, but you'll see that the amount of curve changes. Now you can see a really clear example here of the corners being pushed away and the sensor being brought towards us, which you can tell right away, this looks like an old television. Now right now, this effect is a little bit too strong for my tastes. I'm going to lower this back down to 0.01. But feel free to use whatever value you like here. In my case, 0.01 looks good for me. Now that we have a subtle curve to our image, let's add some chromatic aberration to the edges of the render. In simple terms, chromatic aberration is a rainbow blur effect that you see around the edges of an image when light is being split into different channels. This is similar to the effect that you see when light shines through a prism. We can add this effect by changing the value here on this lower slider. Right now it's being cut off, but if I move this over, we can see here this effect is called dispersion. Again, this is a relatively strong slider. I'm going to start up by setting mine 2.02. Now that the effect is applied, we can zoom in down here on the edges of the image or in the corners specifically. And here we can see this kind of rainbow we color here we're seeing. So we're seeing some yellow, some red, some blue in an area that it didn't occur in before. It's also adding a slight blur to the edges of the screen as well. You can see that here. However, if we zoom out and look here in the middle. Notice that we're not really seeing any of that rainbow blur effect, as the dispersion effect from the lens distortion node really only affects the edges of the image, especially at lower values. If you wanted this effect to be stronger, we can increase this number. Just something maybe in the range of 0.1. With this effect increased, we can see the blur and the rainbow effect is much, much stronger. Also, this effect extends further into the image. We're starting to get a little bit of this rainbow blur here even as far as the shoulder pads. The effect right now is probably a little bit too strong to be mimicking a television. However, it is a cool effect to add a stylistic flare to any of these stylized images. You might find it useful in some of your other personal projects. In the case of this image, though, we're going to set this back down to 0.02, so that it has a more realistic effect. Neither of these two effects that we just added are 100% necessary, but I do think they add a something extra to an already complex layered effect. With that last effect added, that's it. We're officially done with compositing our render. We have one last important effect to add to our image, but we need to start saving the image first. Let's save our image so we can share it with all of our friends and family on social media. The easiest way to save your image is to go over here to the right side, where we have our image shown right now. Go to image and then choose either Save or Save as. Either one will work. Now, find a location that you'd like to save your image and give it a name. We can give our name down here at the bottom. Then for my case, I'm going to call mine retro Anim Underscore final render, underscore zero one. Now, before we save our image, I did mention we have one last effect to add, and that's how we save the image out. Over here on the right side, we can see the file format for the image we're about to save. Right now, it's defaulted to P and G. We're going to click this drop down here and instead change it to JPEG. And then, lastly, we're going to change the quality slider, which is currently set to 90%, and we're going to set it all the way down to 40%. And again, you might be thinking right now, wait, what? Why are we degrading the image quality? And my response to that question would be good question. The reason that we're lowering the quality slider is to add even more artifacting to our image. This gives the final render the appearance that this image has been downloaded and shared hundreds of times on the Internet. And with each successive download, the image loses a little bit more quality. This has a unifying effect for the whole image, similar to what the noise of relay did for us. It applies a low fidelity effect that mixes all of these effects together and makes it that much more believable. It gives the impression that this render is a well loved photo from your childhood, from your favorite anime. And now, now we're done. So now we can save our image. I hope you found this process both interesting and fun. Now go share your render with all of your friends and family to show off all your hard work. Our next lesson is a bonus lesson of sorts. It requires you to have access to photoshop in order to follow along directly. However, even if you don't have it, you might be interested in watching the short lesson to see how it all works. Regardless, don't forget to watch the class project lesson to learn how to customize your project, even if you decide not to watch the bonus photoshop lesson. In the next bonus lesson, we'll add our final render to a real CRT television, utilizing a photoshop mockup file. I'll see you there. 15. Bonus: Using the Photoshop Mockup: In this bonus lesson, we'll add our final render to a real CRT television, utilizing a photoshop mockup file. Let's begin. As mentioned at the end of the previous lesson, this bonus lesson does require you to have access to photoshop. Don't worry if you don't have photoshop as this lesson is entirely optional, and is only meant to add just a bit more detail to the setting of your render. Feel free to watch this short lesson regardless of your access to photoshop, so you can get an idea of how our final render can be incorporated into real photography. To start with, make sure you have the two photoshop mockup files downloaded from the class resources. You'll need to have access to both of these files to get the final effect for our render. We'll start by opening the old TV mockup underscore zero one file. You can leave the old TV mockup underscore screen image file closed for now. Again, we're just going to open the Old TV mock up one by either double clicking on it or opening photoshop and then opening the file from there. Now that we have this file open, we can see that this file has an image applied to the TV for us. At the moment, it's only a placeholder image on the TV, but we'll be replacing it with our render from class. However, before we replace this image on the TV, let's explore this file a little bit so you know how it works. First off, this type of photoshop file is known as a mock up. You can find free and paid mock ups online for all sorts of purposes. One of the most common purposes is placing an image, such as our render, on a piece of clothing worn by a model. You might also see them used to replace TV screens like this or used to change the cover of a book or a magazine with your desired image. These mockup files can get pretty complex. But the one that we're using in this lesson is a simple one that I've made from scratch for you. At the bottom right layer panel, you can see how these images are layered to create this effect. The very bottom layer, TV background is simply the image the rest of these effects are layered on top of. This is the room with the TVs in it, along with a black square I've placed over top of the image to get rid of the original image. As a quick preview of that, this is what it looks like when I slow this layer. Next up, we have our placeholder image, which is found just above that. This is the layer that will feature our render from class soon. However, this layer is actually more than just a simple photoshop layer. You can see by the little chain link here that this is a linked photoshop file instead. The second photoshop file had you download is actually linked directly into this layer. This is actually an important distinction as it will allow us to edit the linked file in isolation, then warp that layer into this whole photoshop file inside this one. This ability to affect the files individually is the key to this whole mock up process. We'll explore this linked layer in just a moment. After the linked layer, we have a folder with some screen corrections inside it. We can see that here by twirling it open. This adjusts things like screen brightness, screen darkening, and some additional noise to match the rest of the photo. Due to the black and white mask on this folder, these effects are only targeting the screen. We can see what this folder is doing just by clicking this eyeball here to turn the visibility on and off. You can see it's relatively subtle, but it does make an addition to the image that helps it fit better into the overall photography. After these changes, we have the background image overlaid one more time just to clean up the edges of the image and make it conform perfectly to the bounds of the screen. This is essentially an image with a window cut out of it so we can see our image through it. We can see an example of this here by turning this on and off. You can notice it doesn't make a huge difference, but when it's turned off, the screen here goes a little bit outside the bounds of where we would expect it to. So by turning this back on, it keeps everything in the correct spot. Lastly, we have a simple layer of reflections that are applied on top of everything to make our image feel like it's behind the reflective glass on the screen. We can find that layer over here as a grouping of a few different reflections that I've created. This makes the image really feel like it's part of the room and not just a pasted image on top of the background. We can see what it looks like without these reflections by turning off this folder. As soon as we turn this folder off, the image still looks good, but it definitely doesn't feel like all of the other TVs in the room. When we turn this back on, now we're getting reflections from the rest of the room to make this feel like the image is actually behind glass. With this brief rundown of the file complete, let's jump into the linked file. First, if you've opened any of these folders, you can go ahead and collapse them just by clicking the small arrow next to them. Now let's jump into this linked file. To do this, all you need to do is double click on the image thumbnail next to the link layer. Which is found here. So we'll double click on this image. And then you may notice that photoshop has difficulty locating where this linked file actually lives. If this happens to you, you'll notice that this link icon now has a little red icon sitting on top of it. So when you double click on this thumbnail to jump into the linked file, Photoshop doesn't know exactly which linked file you're talking about. In this case, it'll pop up a navigator window and ask you which file this should be. Luckily, for us, we already have the other photoshop file downloaded. So all we need to do is tell photoshop that the correct file that is linked is this one here. Old TV Mockup. Underscore screen image zero one. So we're going to select this file and just make sure that you're linking the correct one. It's the one that has screen image inside the name, and then we'll choose Place. After choosing Place, it'll open up that new linked file. And with our linked file open, we can now see all the layers inside this version of the file. At the bottom of the list over here in the layer panel, we'll see our placeholder image. This is the image that we'll be replacing with our final render from class. After that, we have this little pause icon over here. This gives the image the impression that it's a video that's been paused before taking a picture of the room. It adds a bit of realism to our mock up and provides a clever reason as to why our anime isn't playing like a video at the moment. After the pause icon, we have some VHS style pause lines. We can find those here above the pause icon in the layer panel. This is where these scattered lines, about a third of the way from the top are coming from. This just further adds to the illusion that we're watching an old anime on VHS and we've paused the show for a moment. Lastly, we have the TV scan lines found here at the very top. This is an effect that further accentuates the CRT pixels that we added to our render. It simply darkens every other pixel to make a subtle line pattern across the image, similar to an old television. You can see the individual effect of each of these layers by simply turning them off. So here we can see the pause icon. Then we have the VHS pause lines, which also add some noise to the image you'll notice, so we can see some scattered artifacting and noise. Then lastly, the TV scan lines, which had a horizontal banding across the image. Now that we have an idea of what all these overlays are doing, let's bring in our final render from the class. To do this, simply drag from your file browser here, and then drag your final image that we saved in the last lesson and just place it directly on top of this canvas. Now that our image has appeared, we can either hit Enter on our keyboard or go up here and click this little checkbox to place the image. Now that you have your final render placed inside this linked file, Go over here to your layer panel and then click and drag on this newly placed file and place it above this red layer here. So place it above the place render above file. I would now recommend that you select this red file down here and then delete it. That way, it keeps the file a bit smaller. However, if you want to keep the placeholder in there for some reason, just simply make sure that your render sits above that placeholder image. That way you can't see the placeholder below it. And now, as long as your render is at the bottom of this layer stack, and it fills the entire screen, we're ready to save this linked file. To do this, we can just go up here to file, and then choose Save. Now let's go up to this tab here and click back to the original mockup. We'll click this tab here on the left to switch files, and we can see right away that our render is actually displayed on this TV now. And this is all thanks to this mockup file as well as this linked photoshop file here that we just edited over here. Any changes that we make to this file and then save if we go back to the original file, we'll see those changes updated inside this mockup. Due to this linked layer file, already having all of the necessary warping and filters applied to it, our image pops into the screen without any hassle. And again, if you wanted to make any changes such as adding, say, subtitles to the bottom of the screen or changing the render or getting rid of any of these overlay effects or adding more of your own, you would just make those changes here, save it, and then go back to this file, and then it's ready. Now that our mock up file is done to save our final render from this mock up, we can go up here to file. And then choose Save a copy. Now choose wherever you'd like to save this file, and then go down here to change its name. In my case, I'm going to call this retro anime underscore Mockup. Underscore zero one. Then lastly, makes you change the file type. So we're going to click this drop down, and then we'll choose JPEG from the list. After you've chosen JPEG, we can go over here to save It'll pop up another window here, and this time, we are going to leave it on the maximum quality. So you can just leave it set here to 12, or just drag the slider all the way to the right side. As we don't want to degrade this image any further, we'd like it to stay as it is. And then once we're done here, we can just hit. And now you have a JPEG image of this mockup file that you can share with your friends and family on social media. Feel free to use this CRT TV mockup file for any project that you'd like to. This is also a great way to display your class project on a real TV. In the next lesson, we'll discuss how to customize your class project. I'll see you there. 16. Class Project Explanation: In this lesson, we'll discuss the class project. Let's begin. This is it. The last step in your retro anime journey. To finish this whole process, I'd like you to customize this character or environment to make it unique to you. There are a lot of different ways that you could customize your character or your scene. And in this lesson, I plan on explaining some of the ways that you could do this. Before we begin, I recommend you save a new version of this file. That way, any changes made during this lesson don't affect the original file from class. To do this, go up to file. Then Save as. Then down here at the bottom, where we have this red name. I would just simply add the word class project underscore to the front of it. That way you know this version of the file is specifically for your class project. Then we can just hit Save as. This will ensure that any changes that we make to this file now during this class project demo are contained just to this file and won't affect anything in the prior class. Let's start with the most simple and straightforward method, changing the colors. This method is exactly what it sounds like. You can just change the color palette of your character to make it unique. Maybe you like the green helmet, but you think the purple would look nicer as maybe a dark red to match the sword. Now it's your chance to do that. To do this, let's head over to the shading workspace here at the top and then make sure your top right viewport is set to the rendered mode found here. That way we can see all the materials as well as the lighting. For now, don't worry if you don't see your render shown here in the top left. You'll only see this if you've rendered your image since opening this file. Now let's jump into making some color adjustments. In this case, let's select the jaw armor found here in the viewport. Or over here in the list. Once you have the objects selected, go down here, and then make sure you're on slot four to make sure that you're actually adjusting the purple material. Again, that can be found here on the drop down menu, and then just select the material that you'd like to edit, which in this case is purple. Now we have two different ways that we can adjust this color. I'll show you the least destructive method first. This method will allow you to adjust the colors as a whole without changing the original purple at all. We'll need to add a new node for this method. So let's add that now. So we'll hit Shift and A. Go to search, and then type in, HE, and we want to choose u, saturation and value, which is the top option here. Now we have this selected. We're going to place this after the color ramp. So hover over this wire until it turns white and then just click to place it, and it'll automatically connect it for you. Now that we have our purple color ramp routed through this saturation value node, all we need to do is adjust the settings on this new node here. Let's zoom in now so we can see the settings. The most obvious change is to adjust the hue slider. The slider is responsible for the perceived color of your material. You can simply slide this hue slider back and forth to adjust the color of this purple, so we're sliding it along the hue slider and making it a different color. Now you might notice that this slider is very touchy, it's very sensitive. So if you hold shift before dragging on this slider, it'll go a lot slower so you can get a little bit better of control on it. For the example of making this purple into a dark red, we want to set our hue to around 0.85 and he enter. This will start out by converting this purple into a red color that pretty much matches the sword back here. Now, feel free to make this color, whatever you'd like. You don't have to choose red in this case. That's just the example I'll be using. Now, if we'd like to make this red darker, we're going to need to use the value slider down here. Again, this is another slider that we could just hold shift and then drag to make the color either darker, lighter, and we can go above one, so if we make it higher than one, it'll actually lighten the color. But in our case, we want to make it darker. Value for us that might work would be something around 0.45 to make it a slightly darker red but not significantly darker. The last slider that you could use here is the saturation slider found here in the middle. In general, I'd caution against using this slider as anything but the smallest adjustments will significantly affect the shadows and the highlights on our anime style materials. In some niche cases, however, you might find it useful. So if we slide this back and forth, we can see here that sliding it down mostly just makes the material just less vibrant. So it's reducing the saturation, making it more gray. But as we start increasing this, we can see here we start losing the banding in our colors. It kind of collapses down into mostly just one color as we go a little higher. If you're going to use the saturation slider, I would recommend relatively small movements. But in general, if you're going to use it, it also works a little bit better going lower saturation than it does higher. For now, I'm just going to leave mindset to one. With our changes made, we can now hit F 12 or go to render and then choose render image. I've customized the shading workspace for you so that at the top left here, we can see our render. That prevents us from having to switch back and forth between the shading and the render workspace to see what our render looks like. So we go over to the shading. We just see a smaller version of it here, but this is the final render. So now that we know what the easiest method is, what's the slightly more involved method? This would involve changing the actual colors listed here on the color ramp itself. By adjusting the colors individually, we have a lot more control over the effects that we achieve. This would allow us, for example, to make our red armor material that has dark purple shadows and bright orange highlights. This is something that wouldn't be possible by just using this slider here as this is changing all three colors all the same time. We won't have the ability to make just this orange and just this purple. Let's quickly set up this node system so that we can preserve our previous work. So we're going to zoom out a little bit here. Then drag select over these two nodes and move them down to make some room above. Now we're going to select just this color ramp here on the left and then hit shift and D to make a duplicate. We're going to place that above here in the center. Now we're going to drag from this color socket here on the shader to RGB node down into the factor, and then from the color over here into the surface. This will allow us to make a new version of this material without completely losing the original colors if we decided we preferred them instead. Even though these wires here connect to two nodes, because these don't connect to the end output here, the material output, we're not actually seeing them. They're just a part of this chain, but they don't go anywhere. It's essentially a dead end. So the only effects that we're seeing realized here are just this node here. Now that we have a new color ramp added, all we need to do is adjust the colors on the sliders. Let's zoom in here to our color ramp, and then let's use my previous example of red armor with dark purple shadows and brighter orange highlights. I'm not sure if this is going to look great, but it should be a good example for us to play with. Again, in all of these situations here, feel free to make your own changes. You can follow along exactly if you want to get a feel for it. But if you already know what colors you like, feel free to just to choose the colors you like for your example. So our first change is going to be selecting this mid to slider here, so the middle slider. And we're going to switch this to a red color. So with the slider selected, go down here to your color bar and then just find a red color that you like. In my case, I'm just going to find kind of a darker red color. Slide these down. And don't worry about these exact numbers here. Just pick a red color if you're trying to fall along. Okay, so I'm pretty happy with this red. Now, let's get our shadow color sorted out. So first, before we select this shadow slider, I'm going to hit Control C on top of this color bar here to copy this color. So I'll just hit Control C while hovering over top of it. Now I'm going to select this shadow slider here, the far left one, hover over this color bar again and this time, I'll hit control and V to paste it. This will allow us to copy this exact red color and then paste it into this bar here to use as a base for the adjustments. This just saves us some time in trying to get the exact color match. So what this color pasted. We're just going to click on this bar here at the bottom, and then we're going to shift this more towards the purple direction. So we'll use our hue slider here, and then just slide it backwards until it moves towards the purple side. Now we can adjust the value to make it a little bit darker, and then we can play with the hue. Maybe we want a little bit more red in our hue. So we'll slide it more towards this pink band here. Okay, I think that looks good now for the example. And then lastly, we're going to go over here to the far right slider, which is our highlights. And then, again, we're going to hit Control V to paste that same red color that we copied before into this color bar to use as a base, select this color bar, and then we're going to try to make this one a little bit more of a bright orange. So we'll use our hue slider, and this time, we're going to have to slide it all the way back to basically the beginning of the slider and then find something in this orange range. We'll increase the value, increase the saturation, and then maybe play with the hue a little bit more to get it more of a kind of bright, fiery orange color. If at any point, you're not satisfied with any of these colors, simply select the slider you want to change, click on the bar at the bottom, and then adjust the hue to match. So maybe I want this to be a little bit more yellow, a little more saturated. Just keep pulling it towards the yellow, and then we'll increase the value. Okay, I'm pretty happy with this color now. Okay, so I do kind of like these colors. I think they work well together. However, it seems like we could adjust the slider positions to get a better distribution of them. So let's do that now. In this case, let's pull our yellow slider here to the left. Try to make a little bit more of this highlight, and then maybe we move the red slider up a little bit. So we're seeing more of the purple and the yellow and a little less of this red. Again, this is pretty much just personal preference. If you'd like to see a lot more of your mid tones, then you would slide this slider here to the far right. So if you wanted something like that, maybe we would just move it to about here so that these lines are connected. And then we could play with this red slider here to make maybe more or less of the purple rather. So we'll move it to about here. This is really just personal preference. Put these sliders wherever you'd like. And there we go. These colors might not be perfect. Their placement might not be great. But in general, it's pretty interesting look, so I think it's worth keeping. Now that we know a little bit about what we can do to adjust the colors for our character, what else can we do? One thing we haven't mentioned yet is customizing the model of your character. The easiest way to do this and avoid any custom modeling would be to simply remove things from the character. This might be removing pieces of the armor, deleting the eyes, or getting rid of some of the wires. Some of these changes can be pretty easily accomplished by using the outliner over here at the top right, just by hiding specific objects. So in this case, maybe we didn't want to see the shoulder armor. So if we wanted to do that, we would just go to the shoulder armor here. Now, you don't necessarily have to select it, but if you click on these little eyeball icon as well as this camera icon here, that will hide it from both the viewport, which is what the eyeball icon is for. And then the camera will hide it from the render as well. Now, we haven't deleted this object. We're merely just making it invisible. So it doesn't show up in both the viewport, which is what we're seeing here. As well as the render once we final render it. If you don't remember to uncheck both of these, so say if you only uncheck the eyeball here and you notice that it's gone, but you forget to uncheck this camera. When you render this, you'll still see it in the render, even though you don't see it here in the viewport. So make sure that you uncheck both so that it doesn't show up in either. So as an example. Let's just hit F 12 to render our image to see what these new colors look like, as well as the lack of shoulder armor. So we can see now that just by removing pieces of the armor or changing colors on our character, we can really start to adjust this character and make it unique. Now, what if we wanted to do something a little bit more difficult, such as removing the horns from the helmet here. To do this, first go over here to your right viewpoort and select the helmet. Now hit tab, ten to your edit mode, then hit three, ten to your face mode. Then first, just click and drag off the side of your model, to make sure you have no faces selected and then hover over this horn here. This model part here, and then hit L to select all linked faces. Now that we can see we have just this horn selected because the horn is technically a separate mesh, even though they're part of the same object. These faces are to each other. Now we can hit x or delete, so we'll delete this horn, and we're going to choose delete faces, which is here. And just like that, the horn is removed. Now, from this current camera angle, you can't really see the other horn. There are technically two horns on this helmet, but the other one is completely obscured. So if you also wanted to remove that in the same view over here, we're going to rotate our view. That we can see around the other side of the character and then hover over this horn here on the left, hit L to select all linked faces, and then again, hit delete or x and choose faces. So now we have both of these horns deleted. Now let's jump back into our camera view by clicking this little camera icon over here on the right, so we'll click this and it jumps us right back into the view. And then lastly, don't forget to hit tab to exit the edit mode on the helmet. After making these changes, you might also want to move the sword down a little bit to meet the new lower shoulder because of the lack of the shoulder armor. To do this, just select the sword back here, and then we can hit G ten to our move mode, G for grab in this case, and we're just going to slide it down so that it looks like it's contacting the shoulder. So right about here looks fine in this case. The last method that we're going to discuss is changing the camera angle. The first step is going to be to make a duplicate of our camera. So to start with, go over here and then click on this little white box here next to camera and lighting. That will make this collection, the default. That way, the new camera that we're about to paste goes directly into this collection instead of the character collection above. Next, we're going to select our camera here, which is currently grade out just because it's hidden. And we're going to hit Control C to make a copy and then hit Control V again, to make a duplicate. And we can see that pop up here called camera 001. Now, next to both of these cameras, you'll notice a little green camera icon. This tells you which of these cameras is currently the active camera. Right now, our old camera is the active camera because this camera icon has a white box around it. So in this case, let's click this little green camera icon here to make this the active camera. That way the camera that we're seeing through this view here is actually from the new camera, not the old camera. This will allow us to have two different camera angles inside the same file if we'd like to. Now that the new camera is marked as the active camera, all we need to do is move it. One word of warning, however, This character was primarily made to be seen from the current camera angle, and as such, has no body or arms below the camera view. This will limit the amount of angles that you can display them from. However, that shouldn't stop you from trying new angles. The easiest way to adjust this camera is using the camera to view setting. You can enable this setting by simply clicking on this little lock icon here shown below the white camera icon. So we'll click this to turn it on. And now that we have the setting turned on, we can rotate our view while looking through the camera, and it will adjust the position of the camera to align with our movements. Meaning that instead of rotating our view and it popping us out of the camera, instead, we can see here that we're staying inside the camera and it's actually moving the camera wherever we move our view. I find this mode a lot more intuitive than trying to position the camera by hand using the move tools while also looking at the camera. For this quick example, I'm just going to move this camera a lot closer and maybe move the camera more towards the front of the character. We'll position it somewhere around here, maybe make it kind of an extreme close up on the character's face. This is a camera angle that might have been used for a reaction shot during an action sequence to see the expression on this character's face. When you're happy with wherever your camera is currently placed, don't forget to uncheck this lock icon. This will turn off the camera's view settings and make sure that you don't accidentally move your camera position when you're just trying to zoom in and out or pan the view left and right. This camera angle is another situation where you might need to adjust the position of your sword to match the new view. So you might want to just select your sword here and then hit R to start rotating it and rotate it down slightly. That way you can see it in the view. Maybe we push it back a little bit or lift it up, wherever it looks good to you. Lastly, if you made a significant adjustment to the camera angle, like I did here, you'll likely need to move this sky plane as well. We can see here that it doesn't actually fill the view behind the character. Before we do this, we do need to adjust a constraint that I added to it, though. So first, we're going to select the sky plane, then go down here to the bottom right. We're going to choose this blue icon here. It kind of looks like a belt wrapped around two wheels. This is the constraint menu. And then over here where it says Target camera. We're going to select this list here. We're going to change it to the new camera. So right now it's linked up to the old camera. Instead, we're going to link it to the new camera that we just moved, which is camera.001. This constraint that I have added here to the plane, just make sure that the plane always points towards the camera regardless of where we move it. It's subtly adjusting the rotation of this plane to always point towards the camera. It was important that we told it to point to the correct camera before moving it. Now that we have the constraint fixed, simply select your plane back here, and then hit G to begin moving it. And just move it anywhere that it fills up the entire view. It doesn't really matter anywhere in this direction, just as long as you see the sky go from edge to edge. Now, depending on how different your camera angle is, you might also want to adjust the position of the sky texture in the shader editor below. Let's zoom mount down here with our sky still selected so we can see the material, and then we'll be going over here to the mapping node that's plugged into the sky P then we're going to zoom in down here to the mapping node on the location section. I'm just going to hold shift and then start dragging on one of these sliders to get the position of the sky a little different. So maybe in right around here looks okay. We're starting to see some nice clouds here. And then for this one, I'm going to move it down a little bit. So I'm going to increase this number, so I basically just see the sky. This angle is pretty different than the original angle that we had before. So we're going to need to change the position of the sky to make sense with this new camera angle. In most cases, just seeing more or less of this grass in the background or more or less of the sky will be enough to make the believable view. If you need to, you could also adjust the scale found down here to make your sky either appear larger or smaller in the background. In my case, I'm just going to leave mine as is. Now that I've shown you some of the easy changes you can make to customize your scene. What are some of the more advanced techniques that you could use? In this case, I won't be showing you how to do any of these specific changes as they would require a separate lesson or a class on their own. But let's discuss them so you at least have an idea of what's available to you. In general, it's a lot more work to add things to your scene than it is to remove them. In this case, maybe you could replace a piece of this character's armor with a new model of your own design. Maybe your character doesn't use a sword as their weapon and instead prefers some magical staff. Both of these options require a bit more work due to them needing a new model to be created. But it could be a really exciting way for you to make this render unique. You might also consider changing the sky background to a nighttime scene, adjusting the lighting positions, and material colors. Displaying your character at nighttime can totally change the mood of the render and make your character take on a completely different personality. Just don't forget to change the tint of your material colors to match this new lighting scene. In the case of nighttime, You need to shift all of your materials towards the blue or purple direction to simulate moonlight. The color of your lighting also has no effect on the color of your materials when using this anime style material. So you'd need to handle that by hand. Meaning that you would have to go through each of your materials and shift all of the colors towards a more nighttime color palette. You can't just change the color of your lights to blue and expect it to change all of the colors in your scene. Lastly, you could design your own character from scratch and use all of these skills you learned during the class to make something truly unique. This is by far the most ambitious option, but can be incredibly rewarding to realize a character of your own design in this really interesting style. As a quick example of taking the methods discussed in this lesson, just a little bit further, I created this alternate version of our character. Aside from the changes that we made in this lesson, all I've really done is changed more of the colors and swap out the daytime sky for a nighttime one. This was done simply by changing the image for the sky. I've also darkened the colors overall and shifted them more towards a blue to match the nighttime lighting. Hopefully, this gives you some inspiration for your own class project. Regardless of the method you choose, your hard work and practice will be rewarded by your skills improving and your confidence in blender growing. When you've finished your class project, don't forget to render and save your image, so you can share it with all of us in the project gallery for this class. I'm always amazed by the creativity and talent of students when they post their class projects. I can't wait to see what you make. And the next lesson, we'll end the class with some conclusions and farewells. I'll see you there. 17. Conclusion: And that's it. Congratulations on reaching the end of the class. I wanted to take a moment to express my heartfelt gratitude to each and every one of you for being part of this journey. Your participation and excitement for learning is incredibly rewarding for me as a teacher, and I can't thank you enough. I hope you've had a blast diving into this world of retro animate aesthetics and blunder. It's been a pleasure guiding you through the basics, and I hope you've found the experience both fun and valuable. Now that you've got these awesome new skills under your belt, I can't wait to see where your creativity takes you. I wish you the best of luck in your adventures in crafting your own unique anime renders. If you like this class, let other students know by leaving a review. Your feedback really helps me understand what you found most valuable in class. You can leave a review easily by going to the reviews tab just below this video and clicking the Lava Review button. I appreciate the support. After leaving a review, you might want to follow me here on Skillshare as well. You can follow me at any time by clicking the follow button above this video or by going to my teacher profile and clicking the follow button there. Following me is the best way to get notified when I release a new class or make an important announcement. Don't forget to check out my teacher profile for more classes just like this. You might find something else that interests you. Lastly, I want to thank you all again so much for taking my class and supporting me by participating in the class project. I can't wait to see what you all come up with. Farewell for now, and I hope to see you in another class soon.