Journal

My continued research on painterly rendering techniques is beginning to bear fruits: PainterMan, a NPR RenderMan shader, has been rewritten from scratch and now works properly on any surface using a new and thoroughly optimized algorithm that provides much more control over the look.
Sublte displacement creates the illusion of paint strokes. Support for shadows and multiple light sources of any type has also been added. To my amazement it works best at high shading rates in ranges of 100-1000, whereby the time to render a frame has gone down a lot more than I could have achieved through code optimization alone.

As a matter of fact, this algorithm produces a look so different from the last version that I decided to keep the old shader alongside the updated one, simply renaming the new version to PainterMan II. Surely both can prove useful for different objects in my film.

Here’s a sample of what it looks like in a rough test scene:

That’s not all I’ve been up to lately… I have another NPR project cooking for use in Sleeping Dragon: Disney’s Deep Canvas technology looks mighty impressive, but there’s very little technical information or even documentation available on the net. A SIGGRAPH paper from 2003 proved somewhat insightful, but lacks detail here and there – not much of a surprise, of course Disney doesn’t want to give away its trade secrets just like that.

From what I gather, it should be possible to create a system similar in look to Deep Canvas using only standard programs and a little scripting. Alas, I don’t have the time nor desire to create a fully working implementation just for my short movie, so I’ll have to make do with a little hack, if at all.
As it stands, only few scenes in Sleeping Dragon would gain from a system like this, so it’s not my main focus to get this running at the moment. I’ll keep working on it alongside the film and post updates if anything noteworthy comes about.

You may have noticed my studies on NPR rendering techniques, some of which are on display in my Playground. On this project I’ll finally be able to make use of many, if not all, of the techniques I’ve been developing. For Bagel 2 I had various reasons to go with the more common (yet easier to produce) semi-realistic style… but not this time, here it’s cartoon all the way!!

PainterMan

One of my favorite techniques is “PainterMan”, a RenderMan shader I named after the natural and painterly images it produces. I’ve improved some features today to perhaps apply it on a character in my short film.
For testing purposes I’ve rendered the “Stanford Dragon”, playing with various settings in PainterMan to simulate different artistic styles. Note that all these images come straight from the 3d renderer, in this case 3delight, which is to say there’s absolutely no filters, plug-ins or other foul trickery in post involved… Read More »