Overview
For my project, I am working on creating a rendering system or color processing filter that creates the effect of an impressionist painting in a 3D render.
There are a lot of really fancy and technical ways I can try to describe the nitty gritty details, but in the end, I really just want to celebrate my love of color and light in a 3D space.
The Endless Bibliography:
Linked above is my research on non-photorealistic rendering, a branch of computer graphics that explores different approaches to expressing style in graphic art. It is a summary of research with a focus on papers recreating traditional painting techniques with shaders and other graphics techniques.
To call the amount of ‘pre-done’ research discouraging is really an affront to the ingenuity and creativity of humans. These are the puzzle pieces that I get to cram into a nintendo DS until something clicks.
Defining the Style:
As an art movement, Impressionism is focused on smaller, quicker brush strokes, plein air compositions, and the quality of light. Brighter, richer paints were available due to advances in chemistry, and work in opticals studying the effects of complimentary colors and pigment mixing provided more theory for artists to utilize.
It is less about form, and more about color and light – a lot of impressionist art is about lying about what is there to better represent it in the moment. Shadows merge, and there are a lot of optical illusions in small color gradations that add interest and form to things that are, in technical terms, blobs.
It is really difficult to explain all of that to a computer!
Defining What I Want:
quick digital painting of a lighthouse on a hill 
quick 3D model of the same lighthouse, without a hill
My basic plan is to create a system that helps me get the model on the right looking like the drawing on the left, with as little effort on my part as possible. I don’t want to be manually texturing the entire scene, I want to teach my shaders to think how I do, and apply the right colors in the right places.
My two main approaches to this are going to be a shader [for the models texture and initial colors] and a post-processing filter [for the color blending and more brush stroke effects]. I’m expecting both parts to have a lot of unique challenges, especially as I would like to render my scene for use in unity as a game, and if the process is too taxing, the game will be unplayable.
My Biggest Issue is Time
I don’t have enough of it right now. 🙁
I am fairly good at time and project management, however, I have a lot going on in my life and I’ve been feeling very torn at the seams. I don’t want to have my thesis project be the thing I get to after all my work is done, but it has just ended up that way, and I’m lagging behind my personal goals.
aaaahh!! I know we talked about doing this for an IMMovation project together but it makes more sense to figure out all the math for thesis 😛
I love the visuals you have going on and you seem really focused on the art style you want (you even know the jargon, like ‘blob’). I think if you can pull this off it could lead to a niche genre of indy games, maybe even movie rendering, similar to Loving Vincent (http://lovingvincent.com) which I know was hand painted, but you get the idea.
But that’s the future, so let’s address right now: You’ve got some clear goals, though not clear steps of how to get there. Since you’re short on time right now, why not try playing around with some games or prefabs that already exist? What can you do with current shaders to get the effect you want? When I read your post I immediately thought of the art style from The Witness (https://store.steampowered.com/app/210970/The_Witness/), so maybe you could use some assets from there / similar assets for testing?
Maybe look into the effects / math that Photoshop and similar programs use to get the effect you’re looking for (https://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop/how-to/turn-photo-into-painting.html)?
Also, is there any way to ‘fake’ the effect? I’m not super familiar with what shaders do exactly, but is there any way to change just what the *camera* sees, like a filter on top of the player that puts on that effect based on just what is shown on the screen in front of the player instead of changing all the lighting on the whole scene? Like maybe you could design, light, and texture a game normally and instead of reshading the whole thing to look painted, the game just changes the user’s POV? I don’t know if that made sense lol but there might be a way to “fake” the style you’re looking for, and in a way be more efficient?
Anywho, very excited to see where this goes!!
Yeah!!! [Still totally down for an IMMovation Collab, I’m also tempted to take the game part to Games 2]
I am honestly absolutely planning on cheating things, especially if time starts ticking down. I love Loving Vincent, and the way the paintings move is actually a really big inspiration for what I want the end product to look like. [though not with the same colors, because I thought loving Vincent was a bit jarring].
The witness looks like a toon shader with applied gradients, and that’s a part of what I want for the overall appearance, but I’m also trying to create an effect where different objects are given the same shadow color when they have similar amounts of light, and some other weird effects.
I also have more of a plan than I have written here. I think I’m going to spend more of this semester on modeling and game dev, and next semester on the visual development.
And yep, a filter is definitely going to be used! I am currently trying to figure out how much will be done with a post-processing filter and how much will be done as materials and shaders. Right now I need models because different approaches take different amounts of time to compute, and if I want a real-time game, I need to figure something out something that works quickly!