Creating an Abstract "Galaxy" Piece in Blender 3D with Grease Pencil & Separation Lines within a Toon Shader!

Hi, it's Kevin! I recently created a Galaxy-type piece in Blender 3D with grease pencil, and I'm excited to share the process with you. This piece was a revised version of the one I was working on in the background of my "how to deal with a layoff" video. I wanted to do a bit more work on it and create something a bit more loose and abstract.

The inspiration for this piece came from wanting to do something eccentric and explore a Y2K-inspired design. I've been getting back into Kpop recently, and groups like New Jeans and Aespa have been a great source of inspiration for me. Their recent releases have been a throwback to the 2000s, with a Hip Hop and R&B influence, which I absolutely love. I wanted to capture that aesthetic in this piece.

To start, I created a concept using Procreate and Illustrator. I created custom type in Procreate, imported the vector paths into Illustrator, and then brought them into Blender as .svg's. Once the meshes were created, I added a remesh modifier to give it some more geometry and then moved onto shading.

For the main shader on the meshes, I used a basic toon shader with RGB channels separated and then combined together with MixRGB nodes. I constantly adjusted the coverage on the mesh, switching to the sculpt tools. This setup was primarily for the lineart technique I was experimenting with later on.

I then moved onto grease pencil to add illustrated components like wispy elements on the sides, clouds, and stars. I added more elements to complement that galaxy feel with a few stars and particles. The inspiration here was space and hyperpop, so I just did whatever lent itself to this look and what I felt looked good to me.

Finally, I experimented with adding separation lines between the toon shader in Blender. While my method was a bit long-winded, it involved compositing and AOV Output nodes. I'm still working on refining this method, but it was experimental and gave me some interesting results.

Overall, this was a fun piece to work on, and I'm excited to explore more focused animations in future videos. If you're interested in learning more about grease pencil, be sure to check out my course over at CG Boost called Master Grease Pencil in Blender. I go over everything you need to know to get started with it, from basic skills to a full scene. Thanks for reading, and I hope this post has been helpful to you!