Test Animation:
I’ve been learning digital painting in ProCreate and wanted to see how well I could transfer this new skill to Blender by utilizing painted textures. I’ve previously done Ghibli inspired and general NPR projects, so that experience was very useful going into this. I’m shocked how easily this work has clicked, and I found the “secret sauce” to this look was some very light post processing using the Kuwahara node in the compositor. Below is my visual test scene so you can see the difference yourself.
I used a very small size for the Kuwahara node in this example (just 3), but it did a great job setting a consistent detail level. This was a huge pain point of the Dune project I had done before, it was obnoxious having to make sure the details were consistently scaled for each scene. While not totally equivalent since the NPR style is different here, I think it elevates the vision I have. I played with larger sizes of the Kuwahara node, but detail is just totally lost and the result looks over-filtered.
As I was putting this to motion with animation, I found myself impressed by the temporal stability of this method. I shouldn’t be surprised; it’s some light post processing over a normal setup for an NPR render, but the lack of any artifacts helps sell the faux 2D effect even better.