[Tool] 3D to 2D Blender Pixel Shader

[Alex Sinigaglia]

http://www.cgchannel.com/2015/02/this-free-blender-shader-turns-3d-models-into-pixel-art/

Free Blender shader turns 3D models into pixel art

Japanese artist Toshihiro Kushizaki has released the Pixel Art Shader: a free Blender shader that should convert any 3D model into old-school pixel art.

To render out a pixel art image, you just need a 3D model in .x format and a palette texture, which defines the set of colours to be used; but you can augment the result with standard texture maps, even including AO.

The image is generated in BMP format, and the results look pretty good, at least in the demo scene.

There’s a detailed online manual, but like the rest of Kushizaki’s site, it’s in Japanese, so if you’re a non-Japanese-speaker, you’ll need to navigate Google Translate.

Download the Pixel Art Shader on Toshihiro Kushizaki’s website (Automatic English translation)

Read an English-language user-contributed tutorial on using the shader.

Other examples:
Spoiler

I didn't see this posted here, so here it is. As always, please move, merge or delete this topic if it already exists or is in the wrong place.

I guess there already are tools that can make this happen.
Still, give it a try if you're interested and skilled with Blender.

[Kazuya Mochu]

I saw this pop up on facebook. It looks really cool and its by far the best pixelated 3d I've seen.

the only issue with 3d and pixel art is that 3d is very rigid when it comes to animation.
I had a try and replicating this using 3dsmax and did something slightly cool, but nothing as good as this. kudos for the developer!

[wzl]

I found interesting what they did with guilty gear xrd It probably doesn't qualify as pixel art, but it shows some nice handling of animations. They for one thing don't interpolate between keyframes to keep the oldschool frame-based animation feel to it. To compensate they added the effect/blur trails(?) as an extension to the mesh.
When i'm looking at it i'm still pondering whether thats actually 3d until the camera starts to orbit around the characters. It's impressingly well made.

[Kazuya Mochu]

This is what my experiments got me. no antialiasing on the render and used a gradient ramp on the diffuse, set to follow the light direction

[lachrymose]

So like, could I use this to avoid learning to animate? 

[Kazuya Mochu]

animation is animation. 2d or 3d. they just look slightly different because of the technical aspects, but they are base on the same fundamentals

[Ai]

So what is the advantage over my standard pixel-art method with Blender (which is just: Use diffuse ramps with hard edges, use either no speculars or specular ramps with hard edges; turn off antialiasing)?
All I can see so far is that perhaps it works better with multicolor layered textures.

EDIT: Examples of the results of my methods: 1 2

EDIT2: This
gives some vague clues as to what is going on beyond what base Blender does.

[PixelPiledriver]

Looks pretty cool.
Lethal League used a similar process and it looks nice.

[Conzeit]

this doesnt really look that interesting to me, it looks like a celshade script that is focused on not creating too many jaggies....(I guess there's some pallete going ons from Kazuya's post?) what I really want to see is someone tackle open source-ifying what they did with Guilty Gear Xrd. it has so much potential for doing pixelarty stuff.

there was a part about using normal maps (or something to that effect, I dont really 3D yet so I dont have perfect langauage :p) to tell the program to shade things differently from what the geometry would suggest. They used it to make very pixelarty things, what they did with the hilights of May's anvil thing struck me as specially full of potential.

I REPOST THIS SHIZNIT AGAIN BECAUSE I THINK EVERYONE SHOULD HAVE FLIPPED OUT OF THEIR MINDS AND NOBODY DID!! FSDADSDSADA

the english transcription of the GGXRD behind the scenes interview thingy.
http://www.polycount.com/forum/showpost.php?p=2099538&postcount=229
http://www.polycount.com/forum/showpost.php?p=2107579&postcount=241

original article
http://www.4gamer.net/games/216/G021678/20140703095/
http://www.4gamer.net/games/216/G021678/20140703095/index_2.html

*cast spell on 3d experts of the forum so they flip out about this shit and make a big fucking community activity out of creating some mad script maggiks that make it really easy for a 3d moron like me to do this kind of shit*

[Ai]

this doesnt really look that interesting to me, it looks like a celshade script that is focused on not creating too many jaggies....(I guess there's some pallete going ons from Kazuya's post?) what I really want to see is someone tackle open source-ifying what they did with Guilty Gear Xrd. it has so much potential for doing pixelarty stuff.

there was a part about using normal maps (or something to that effect, I dont really 3D yet so I dont have perfect langauage :p) to tell the program to shade things differently from what the geometry would suggest.

That would be a normal map if it had anything to do with normals . I guess the right thing to call it might be a shader input texture -- a texture that the shader uses, that isn't directly displayed in any normal sense.

They used it to make very pixelarty things, what they did with the hilights of May's anvil thing struck me as specially full of potential.

It's an anchor, no? Kind of different from an anvil

the english transcription of the GGXRD behind the scenes interview thingy.
http://www.polycount.com/forum/showpost.php?p=2099538&postcount=229
http://www.polycount.com/forum/showpost.php?p=2107579&postcount=241

Hey, that's really interesting.
It has some things in common with Paperman IMO.
I think you could do most of that stuff using Freestyle in Blender.

Looking at the things in detail, you have:
* line thickness info in Alpha channel of vertex color
* ambient occlusion in Red channel of vertex (since it's using a cel shader, this is functionally just an offset for the light/dark threshold )
* separate ambient occlusion layer also in Green channel of control texture (used to make areas always shadowed or always lit)
* Specular size and intensity in B and R channels of control texture
* SSS color is a separate texture, nothing complex there.
* Vertex color Green and Blue channels are ignored.

The axis-aligned textures are really weird, honestly. I understand how it works but it's gonna be a pain to get the angles working how you want.

I'd like to hear more about the bone system for the face, personally -- I suspect that they automatically manipulate the bones relative to the camera normal so that the geometry looks sculpted for whatever perspective you are viewing it at. (in addition to the normal animation keying they refer to in the second translated article)

Bone scaling in 3d -- not sure I know of any other system that does this out of the box. It's obviously very useful for exaggerated movements. Not sure how to do in Blender.

The mentioned postprocessing effects are definitely doable in Blender, not sure how to make them make sense in relation to pixel art though.