Epiphany

Today started cold and frosty and ended cold and wet <shiver>.. most Tuesday evenings are 'order in' nights so yay, pizza :) I also had to drive a loan car for the day, which was a manual (mine is automatic) and that was interesting...

As often happens, my mind was still mulling over ways to create a hand pencil coloured effect in Blender Cycles while at work today. I came up with a couple of ideas using colour mix nodes, noise textures, vector mapping and colour ramps. I tried it out tonight and it came out like I imagined, but then came my (small) epiphany. I suddenly realised I had been thinking too much like a 3D artist and not enough like a 2D one. Hand drawn animation is, of course, drawn in 2D, even if representing 3D objects. Therefore pencil colouring artefacts (lines) will always face the 'camera'. So as you can map textures to work just like that in Cycles I gave it a try and Blender is busily rendering a short test now.

Long day tomorrow with work followed by teaching.

Have another picture :)