Hey all!
I totally encourage you all to check out
this post.
When you do research on how anime's are made (and any old cartoons), you find that the backgrounds are almost always hand painted. As far as Blender work goes, there's no way (unless GOD tells me to), that I'm going to hand paint every background for a project I'm currently working on. This is a test of an environment with a painterly look to the background and foreground that would make up part of the same elements:
Now,
Picture to people and
Akvis have both by far exceeded what I thought existed today and while these are really really amazing, they do not fit the brief... Blender has to process it's 3D backgrounds in realtime and when I tried baking everything, it just did not work. Not only was the resolution too low, but the maps come in various parts that need to be layered. It's not practical for what I want to achieve, so we need to find a way to do this in Blender, and while it's not even close to perfect, I found something close enough for what I need:
(really brightened up for clarity)
As you can tell, I used 3D models for my backdrop, but I assure you, the effect is 2D all the way, so it can be applied to pictures as well. In the above case, I applied it only to certain materials, to prevent it from messing with the character, glare and other active components that use elements like Freestyle.
Here is a before and after before I show you how to do it.
Before > After
Zoom:
(top right corner zoom)
As you can see, it's not perfect, but it still does a good job. Doing this in Blender is super easy.
All you need is:
- An image input (whether it be an imported image, set apart material, etc.)
- Filter > Dilate/Erode node (to create painted strokes)
- Filter > Blur node (to fade the original detail and keep the color, so the detail from the dilation and erosion is clear)
- Color > Mix Node (to color the dilation and erosion result)
Plug them in like this:
Note: Your image input does not have to come from an image outside of Blender. For some reason I really am compelled to keep saying that.
Go ahead and give this a try! :D
Remember to like and share if you liked this simple technique!
Have a great one!
Thank YOU!!!!!!!!!
Hey! I'm having an incredible learning experience, not only learning how Blender works (yes, still learning), but also about Open-Source and the incredible software available. Stick around!
