Stylized Take on Serie from Frieren That Feels Purely 2D

Introduction

Hi again! I feel super honored and excited to have the opportunity to share this space with you once more. The last time we talked was about the Zuko project. Since then, I've had plenty of time to learn, refine my techniques, and polish aspects of the original shader that I now feel are much better optimized.

A lot of things have changed and been updated. My life has settled in Canada, and I'm currently working at Netflix Animation Studios. I'm really excited because the feature film I worked on comes out in November 2026, so the countdown is on! I also launched a Patreon along with several courses breaking down my workflow.

There hasn't been a shortage of personal projects either. I’ve been constantly creating new tests to push my understanding of different workflows and shaders. The last time we spoke, Zuko was only my second major test, but now I have several more under my belt and others brewing — both personally and professionally. As I once said, these personal projects serve as a form of therapy for me; they keep me focused, engaged, and inspired.

Serie from Frieren

For this project featuring Serie, I wanted to create a quick test to dive headfirst into Blender. It was my first time using the software, so I wanted to take what I already knew from programs like Maya and translate it over. Usually, my tests in Maya focus heavily on custom shading, but in this case, I wanted to lean into a digital painting approach, concentrating on how the paint strokes look and, above all, experimenting with tools like Grease Pencil.

It all started when I saw a concept on Pinterest that completely fascinated me. However, when I went to look for the artist to ask for permission to turn it into a 3D test, I realized it was an AI-generated concept after noticing connectivity and continuity errors in the details. The project then transformed into taking everything I loved about the image, fixing the structural flaws, and elevating it. Part of the challenge was creating a model capable of supporting hand-painted textures effectively.

Form and silhouette are crucial in 3D modeling, so my priority was ensuring the sculpt felt cohesive from every angle. Since it's a 3D model designed to feel purely 2D, the back of the head was definitely a tricky area to get right. Changing the proportions too drastically caused it to lose the appeal of the front view.

Regarding references, I've been focusing a lot lately on this flat/anime aesthetic. The last one I did was a test in Maya using the same base shader logic I discussed for Zuko, refining it further for the Fern project to achieve a more traditional manga look. So I took everything I learned from those projects and applied it directly to my work in Blender.

Modeling

For modeling, my workflow is always the same: I start in ZBrush with a super quick sculpt. After that, I have some iterations where I need to slowly polish what I am doing; sometimes I don't notice my mistakes, which is why taking a couple of days away from the model to reset my eyes is my best ally for making sure I'm getting closer to what I'm looking for.

Once I have my base mesh in DynaMesh, I use ZWrap to clean up my topology. All of my character projects share the same base topology framework, and from there, I append additional loops or specific geometry as needed. This base topology originated from my Belle project, and I've been refining and perfecting it over time.

Hair is my favorite part. What I do is start with a cylinder, remove the top and bottom faces, and shape it into hair locks, making the tips smaller and the middle wider, and duplicate it until I build the full hair shape. For me, it is very, very important to have the final shape ready; in the case of the project below (Ellie), she was created with XGen, so I couldn't afford to make mistakes in the shape, whether as a proxy or not.

That cylinder method is my usual workflow. However, for this character (Serie), I decided to take a different path and work purely with planes (single-sided planes). I wanted to avoid conventional 3D volume affecting the readability of the silhouette from different angles.

Once the overall shape was defined, I made sure to clean up the inner faces and work with Backface Culling (single-face visibility). This way, the hair acts as an outer shell that reads cleanly and flatly from any perspective, without internal geometry interfering with the 2D aesthetic. This is how she looked:

Regarding UVs, since this project relies so heavily on digital painting, I made sure to prioritize minimal distortion around the face and primary focal areas. I kept the UV layout clean with consistent texel density to give myself enough resolution and control when painting the details in Substance 3D Painter. I don't need a lot of UDIMs; in this case, I am using around 6 to keep the detail and close-ups.

Texturing

I separate my NPR projects into two categories:

1— Shader-driven projects: A lot of the information comes directly from the Shader. Without the shader, the project doesn't work, so almost all the weight comes from how much I'm working with light and shadows through the shader. A great example of this is Zuko or the Halloween project, where I mixed all my characters.

2— Paint-driven projects: Digital painting is the most important part. Without digital painting, there is no base, and the shader takes a backseat. This is the case for Aldrin and Serie (my latest test in Blender). 

There's no magic formula that does the work; in reality, much of it comes down to learning how to paint. In my classes, I always recommend starting with 2D painting; it has helped me tremendously to perfect my 3D techniques, not only in anatomy but also in digital painting.

For my projects, I always start in Substance 3D Painter. The workflow is to start with the base color and gradually add different details bit by bit. I like to start with Fill Layers because if I use normal paint layers right from the start, I don't have control to tweak colors later.

When it comes to brushes, I mostly rely on a custom set I created a while ago for my personal projects, and my core setup rarely changes. However, if you're just starting, you don't need complex brush packs. My biggest recommendation is to explore Substance 3D Painter's default library. The Knife Hard brush is fantastic for defining sharp edges and shapes, and the Charcoal brush is great for adding organic texture and tone.

Once I know how my colors are working and whether they complement each other or not, my next step is adding paint layers where I tweak details and introduce new colors. In these layers, I don't overcomplicate things; it's mostly using the color picker and fixing things that might or might not work.

For the Blender part, the most important step was creating a basic toon shader that doesn't produce shadows (meaning that, unlike all my previous projects, this one isn't affected by light, as the light is already baked in). The shader is also quite basic and would work the same if it were an Emission shader, but I wanted to construct the shader setup to understand how it should work in case I want to add lights and shadows later.

There were two main reasons Blender was crucial for this project:

• Inverted Hull for outlines: This helps me generate outline borders and adjust them as needed. For this, I assigned a dark material, duplicated the geometry with an offset, inverted its normals, and enabled Backface Culling to generate the outline (Inverted Hull), achieving a very precise edge effect.

• Grease Pencil: This was my first time playing with these tools, and I was thrilled. For Grease Pencil, I used different line types to complement the lines I had already painted inside Substance 3D Painter. This was done to give the illusion of an animated 2D drawing that reacts dynamically when the camera moves.

For anyone interested in seeing the full process in motion, I'm currently polishing a walkthrough video with a time-lapse of this project that will be available very soon!

Conclusion

I can mostly only work on Sundays, so the project was done in about two months of Sunday afternoons, especially when I'm not working on my Patreon or other projects, so it's hard to give an exact number of days. However, it felt quite short compared to others. In this case, I wasn't planning anything bigger, just an experiment to understand how things work in Blender.

Blender was something new, but like any program, it had its learning curve. After that, it was much simpler than it seemed. Something I always argue is that the program itself doesn't matter as much as what you need to achieve your look development, what your references look like, and why using one tool over another makes a difference.

Also, all my past projects helped me build a solid base of what I wanted to achieve without getting lost. So I didn't spend too much time thinking about how to do a specific thing in Blender; instead, I focused on: "If I already do this in Arnold, what is the equivalent path in this program?" The rest felt like playing; experimenting with Grease Pencil and adding lines with procedural modifiers was really fun to play with.

What I definitely needed was to understand Blender's core basics, as camera navigation and shortcuts are different. For that, I used Lana’s video (Cute Blender Tutorial For Beginners 2026), watching it several times to make sure I understood the shortcuts and camera movements. Also, Claude and Gemini were super useful when asking specific questions, such as "If I apply an edge flow like this in Maya, what is the equivalent in Blender?" That made my adaptation period very smooth.

My goal is to keep testing different styles and pushing the boundaries of various software. I’m still eager to test RenderMan’s toon shader, and having recently attended SIGGRAPH in LA, I saw upcoming tech and updates that have me super inspired. At the moment, Blender feels incredibly versatile for what I need, and it will be exciting to see how my workflow evolves. But at the end of the day, software is just a tool; you are the artist behind it.

(Speaking of always experimenting...here is a sneak peek of my next project currently cooking!)

Mani Salguero, Surfacing Artist at Netflix

Interview conducted by Amber Rutherford