Non-Watercolor NPR techniques

[RyanSpaulding]

Anyone know of maybe an oil painting technique or a shaded pencil technique? It seems we always talk about watercolor ish...

 

Thanks in advance.

[mbr]

Search for Painter stuff. Computer Arts Mag has tons of great tutorials (none of which I've done). I'd love to do it, but time is just not there.

[3dp]

for max there is a japenese plugin called pencil + ( i think don't have maxinstall close to hand and it's not one i uesd past the demo stage)

as you can gather it does pencil shading

a bit hard work - you need to practice with it to master it

 

here we go

 

http://www.psoft.co.jp/visual/en/

 

and on the face of it this seems to have all the knobs and whistles but i've not had a go with it so

 

http://www.reyes-infografica.com/plugins/npr1.php

 

check the animation gallery for both of them and be very afraid as this stuff has een around for a couple of years at least

 

one last point this type of work can often take longer to produce than good old fashioned cgi but you'll have more options and more of a chance of getting a style together too

 

other toys in the box include piranessi sketchup and the host of cartoon shader plugins and as mentioned elsewhere painter

also photoshop has some nice little actions and plugins which if you know where to look and how to combine can come up with some very nice and very fast results

[vizwhiz]

hi There

 

Ryan

 

have you checked out Piranesi ??

 

http://www.informatixsoftware.com/forums/

 

we just got This at work and i am just now starting

to Learning This

 

Looks cool so far, some upfront internal re-organization

but after That

 

it can do some way cool Things

 

check out The Art Gallery

 

http://www.informatixsoftware.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=4

 

RIBCAGE000

 

http://www.informatixsoftware.com/forums/showthread.php?t=399

 

snoopywang

 

http://www.informatixsoftware.com/forums/showthread.php?t=261

 

dondee

 

http://www.informatixsoftware.com/forums/showthread.php?p=1266#post1266

 

**

 

Thanks

 

Randy

[DennisB]

Have a look at Painter, at least for a shaded pencil look you can control through a pen kinesthetic. Actually, I haven't seen anything that mimics natural media better.

 

There was a tutorial floating around on converting a photo to colored pencil drawing, both easy and effective. It has been a couple of years though. Try Athene as they carry a lot of older Painter tutorials. Essentially, you just use a clone of the image as the source image and redraw the image using a colored (or black) pencil. If you use a particular type of stroke and don't fill in the entire image, it can look very much like an original drawing.

 

As for Painter itself. Download the 30 day tryout. If you're simply converting a flat, finished render you can use Painter Classic, which is a giveaway with Wacom tablets and such. There's no alpha channel or layer support, but you shouldn't need that. You will benefit from using a tablet, however.

 

D.

[RyanSpaulding]

Hey all...

 

I finished my watercolor NPR render. The client just wanted a quick test of what we could do and I whipped it up quick. I'm positive that Ernest or other NPR gurus coulda have done better, but here it is anyways...

 

http://www.theenvisiongroup.net/images/watercolor_pen.jpg

 

And VW, yeah, I have Piranesi 3, but none of this project was done in 3d. It was all Photoshop, so I couldn't render out an EPix with depth for use with the shaders.

[Ernest Burden III]

That's great!

 

Overall quite nice effect.

 

The worst parts are the tree shadows, too big for the tree, wrong angle for the sun. Still, not all that distracting.

 

And the sameness of the roof planes could be improvedby selecting the more foreshortened planes and darkening them with curves. That would help the 3D effect. The same could be done for the major massing of the building, if done with subtilty.

 

Throw in some darkening of the foreground, perhaps, for that painted look.

[RyanSpaulding]

I've found with this experimentation that it is KEY that you do some pre-filter editing. If you have siding, fade the shadows...try and eliminate as much of the black as possible. I still wish PS didn't add black, but instead used deep and dark hues to the colors around it...oh well I guess.

 

I think that this will work real well with a render when I'm able to control such things.

 

I'm dedicating myself to learning some NPR stuff. The company I work for has never done an NPR, so I gotta add that to the repitoir.

 

Workflow:

1. Added a saturation layer (bumped up saturation for more vibrant paint look)

2. Merged

3. Double/Triple the image size (the size of the paint marks is too big sometimes and I dont think you can really control it)

4. Apply Watercolor Filter (try to get it to eliminate as much black as possible)

5. Duplicate layer

6. Apply the Water Paper filter to the new layer (make sure it's on top)

7. Change opacity to a low setting (mine was 22%)

8. Merged

9. Added a slight gaussian blur to take away some sharpness

10. Took the original photo and desaturated

11. Apply the Trace Contours filter to the desaturaded image (you should come out with something similar to a line drawing)

12. Lay that layer on top and set the opacity to your liking

13. Merge - Completed

 

That was what I did for this image. I'm not sure it will work well with all images, but make sure you take out some detail before you start.

 

Thanks for the comments Ernest. I'll keep working on it.

 

And the sameness of the roof planes could be improvedby selecting the more foreshortened planes and darkening them with curves. That would help the 3D effect. The same could be done for the major massing of the building, if done with subtilty.

 

I'm not quite understanding what you mean by "darkening with curves". Please explain if you have time.

[MooseDog]

learning some NPR stuff

 

this might help your research. good luck!

 

Stylized Depiction