Painting with Polygons...

This just showed up on Flay.com, (A Lightwave centric news site) for “Painting with Polygons,” a paper being presented at Siggraph 2009. While it uses techniques that are not in themselves wildly new and are Lightwave centric, but it does it in an excellent way that looks wonderful. The most important aspect is that most of the aesthetic parameters seem adjustable, and the results maintain “temporal coherence” over the course of multiple frames. This means that the surface texture does not “crawl” or “flash” frame-to-frame. I would welcome having someone with Blender skills beyond mine, see if this can be implemented in Blender. Combined with some of the line work of the Freestyle branch, wowie!! A simple step tutorial would be crucial. I will try to translate it myself by watching the video repeatedly, but having it “distilled” for simple creation by someone with great Blender “chops” would be excellent. Great work, wonderful animations, check out the other links.
Paul

It looks like a quick and dirty way to get a nice painted look to things, I wonder if this can be combined with something similar like PSP 7’s brush strokes filter to get a perfectly convincing effect?

This looked interesting, and I was bored, so I thought i would give it a try and I think I sort of came up with a way to create this effect.
First I added a wave modifier to the mesh, with “cycle” checked, given a cloud texture to control modulation, speed set to 2, height to .2, and width to 2.
this will distort the mesh every other frame, so i set the frame step to 2, and i guess you would animate at double the desired frame rate, like 48fps.
Add a vector blur node, the enable “do composite.” This gives you every other frame, with the mesh unchanged per frame, but the edges are blurred slightly
I also added a procedural bump map, a softened diffuse toon shader, and a ramp shader set to “result,” with a dark greyish color on the left and clear on the right side, to lighten up the shadows.

JaredR, Hello… Glad to hear someone attempting, but… tease me will ya! no example posted ;>) I appreciate the sharing of your technical efforts, I will see if I can duplicate what you have described. Watching a video and seeing some results will be helpful, at least for me. I want to combine it in the compositor with the Freestyle line renderer which is developing on a branch on GraphicAll.org. Thank you again for your directions.
Paul

I so want my clouds an water to look like those in the examples.

The video makes it seem so easy,but I’m banging my head over this,cause I know it can work.
Had more success using the old motion blur,wave modifier,and noise texture.

Hope someone nails this and post up.

wip so far (render: 3 sec.):
I’ll try to work on an animation soon too.

http://i132.photobucket.com/albums/q20/jaredr122/teapot1.jpg

Wow! quick render jaredr.
Not bad.

I’m using Suzanne,but my oscillation and blur is still not right.
What are your setting on the vector blur node?

Thanks Paul! Fantastic work - and it was completely off my radar. I did some extensive testing in this direction a few years ago. Iterative motion blur was the key to getting artistic looking results, but I’m sure that realistic blur could work with the right settings. As proven by OutsideHollywood. I’m drooling.

The wave modifier doesn’t really work here because it interpolates between only two versions of the mesh: the original and one displaced version. To merge up to 16 different displacement maps into one frame, use a procedural displacement texture (no modifier) with an IPO to control the texture offset. Use linear interpolation and cyclic extension over a 1-frame interval. This will also maintain temporal coherence as described in the paper, i.e. the same set of random displacement maps will be used for each frame, making the method suitable for animation.

http://img32.imageshack.us/img32/7812/polypaint.jpg

Edge rendering will give nice results too.

http://img44.imageshack.us/img44/2318/polypaint2.jpg

http://img268.imageshack.us/img268/8053/monkeypainted.jpg
Sorry about the big image :o.

Could anyone get it to work with vector blur? I could only use it using
the simple blur in the render buttons. Anyway, great technique!

Ok that way seems closer to the video. I thought about using regular motion blur for a second, but it does take a lot longer. Then again, If that’s not an issue, your way seems like a better way to go.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_AUg6RwU-A :spin:

Now the tests here showing it’s possible in Blender already is a pleasant surprise, I would’ve thought you needed like algorithms not found in Blender to pull this off like they did, but apparently you can already do it in Blender;)

I think the whole point of doing it this way is that it can be done in almost any CG package,
without any special render code or features specific to non-realistic rendering.

Our studio has been experimenting with ways to achieve a hand-painted look with basic tools that are common to most 3D applications.

Nice one eye208.

I got as far as good looking stills,but my animation is not as good as the Lightwave video.
You’ve nail on the head.

Any chance of seeing node diagrams or .blends?
Looks like everyone is taking slightly different approaches to the same idea.

Any chance of a .blend? been messing with this a bit today but cant get the temporal continuity going…

Here ya’ go:

http://www.pasteall.org/blend/375

As for nodes, you dont need any.

This is a great technique that has a ton of possibilities! Here are some tests I did. No extras textures added so there’s definitely room for improvement. Some node work was done.

Original render
http://www.blendernewbies.com/forum_resp/npr_test03.jpg

Test 1
http://www.blendernewbies.com/forum_resp/npr_test02.jpg

Test 2
http://www.blendernewbies.com/forum_resp/npr_test01.jpg

I’ll probably do a tutorial on this after messing around with it some more.

yeah, this is really awesome. very easy and quick to setup. awesome find!!
if you set OSA to 11 or 16 and blur-factor to 1 you get really nice and smooth results. maybe also some cool 3d-clouds are possible, who knows? combined with SSS maybe…
i could imagine that we are going to see some great testresults and toon-render-setup in the next couple of days! :smiley:
i am sure this technique can be polished very good with some material-and compositing nodes. exciting!