introduction

This was an experiment to achieve convincing pixel art portraits through Blender.

The artstyle was partly inspired by the visual novel "Milk Outside a Bag of Milk Outside a Bag of Milk".

Camera rotation purely to demonstrate it's a 3D model.

model

Turnarounds

Imperfections help sell a hand-made look.
By making camera position dependent noise vertex displacements, the model bridges the uncanny valley faced by most 3D that attempts to be perceived as hand-drawn 2D
by artificially "messing up" the silhouette in ways that a human might.

Concept

shader

Outlining

One of the hardest aspects of pixel art to achieve when rendering 3D is maintaining true 1-pixel outlines.

Native Blender outlining through Freestyle is unreliable for authentic-looking 1px outlines, due to the creation of what pixel artists call "doubles". Even when convincing at one freestyle line thickness, it frequently breaks immersion at different angles or scales. I developed a custom approach to this, using Blender's compositor and cryptomatte masking to define which portions of the model should have lines.

First we start with the base layer. Already, this is rendered at a small resolution of 534px.

Using Blender's Cryptomatte feature, we can split the model into each separate part that should have a silhouette outline. For this model, I picked out the body/neck, face, hair, and iris.

Each one of these has an outline applied, and then the outlined layers are recombined into the final product.