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Crafting Painterly Shaders
A detailed essay on my research and process of building a shader to mimic paint, watercolor, and aquarelle by exploring various implementations of the Kuwahara image smoothing filter.
In it, we will deep dive into the characteristics of the Kuwahara filter that make it so great at transforming our work into paintings, as well as look into several techniques highlighted in the many papers I read to improve the original implementation and have it return a sharper, and more anisotropic output. Up until then, my only attempts at painterly shader consisted of several implementations of custom materials focused on emulating specific aspects of paint that I instinctively listed as essential to get a convincing output: The demo below bundles all those improvements together on top of the anisotropic Kuwahara filter making an otherwise standard scene look like a beautiful painting with many features reminiscent of watercolor which is the effect I was originally trying to achieve.
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