I’ve come up with a (new?) method to paint stroked lines on stylized cartoon characters.
Until now I’d always used process done for Guilty Gear (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhGjCzxJV3E ) to make interior cartoon lines. That process can be extremely labor intensive; it’s meant to avoid the use of textures as textures can be blurry.
A few days ago however it hit me: perhaps the blurriness can be used to our advantage. One of the more interesting ways to render vector graphics is a signed distance field, where you basically threshold a kind of blurry image. The blender node setup for this is dead simple:
The basic process is to paint with a really soft brush, and then use the blur brush to soften the lines even further as needed.
Here is a preliminary test:
Note that the outer lines are generated automatically with the inverted hull method.
Here is the previous image but without the outer lines:
Getting the painted lines to blend with the outer hull lines wasn’t as difficult as I thought it would be:
Here’s a close up of some of the pained lines. They’re not as good as the Guilty Gear method will give you, but they’re not as bad as a simple painted texture either. It still takes a pretty high resolution,
that’s a 2k x 4k texture.
Here’s the equivalent part of the texture:
