Since I started in CG, I’ve always wanted to learn how to make animation look like a painting because I think it looks stunning. For my Lighting and Rendering class, I chose to research non-photorealistic rendering (NPR) so I could understand how to use this technique and bring it into my own projects. This led me to create a pipeline that can easily be transferred from one project to the next. Essentially it is something I can just “slap on” 3D scenes. The brush strokes are driven by the objects position in the scene, which makes replication across projects straightforward. One thing I’d like to keep improving is the readability of materials, since brush strokes on smaller details can sometimes blur and obscure them.

I wanted to test the readability of different types of materials, so I created some in Houdini and gathered others from online sources. Seeing them applied in motion and how much they changed was a great way to grasp how they read.