BLENDER TUTORIAL - An NPR (Non-Photorealistic Rendering) of an Electronic Circuit 3D Model

Text version of a videotutorial published on my Youtube channel.

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Hello everyone!

In this tutorial, I will describe the node setup I created to achieve an NPR (Non-Photorealistic Rendering) from a 3D model with PBR materials and textures. Specifically, we will use a 3D model of an electronic circuit to obtain a rendering similar to the illustrations in electronics magazines that I used to read many years ago.

I'll start by showing you the difference between the rendering obtained by importing the 3D model, which already has its PBR Textures connected to a Principled node, and the non-photorealistic rendering, which uses only the Base Color Texture and a suitably configured Principled node.

This tutorial was created in Blender 4.1, and the rendering engine used is Cycles.

The tutorial will follow this outline:

• we will disable the existing lighting in the scene;
• we will make an initial editing of the default inputs of the Principled node;
• we will disable some Ray Visibility options to eliminate Color Bleeding and other unwanted shading effects;
• we will enable Freestyle to provide an outline to the geometries in post-production;
• finally, we will modify the inputs of the Principled node again to create simple shading based on the orientation of the objects' faces relative to the camera, making the geometries' appearance less monotonous.