Painting with Polygons: A Procedural Watercolor Engine

Abstract

Existing natural media painting simulations have produced high-quality results, but have required powerful compute hardware and have been limited to screen resolutions. Digital artists would like to be able to use watercolor-like painting tools, but at print resolutions and on lower end hardware such as laptops or even slates. We present a procedural algorithm for generating watercolor-like dynamic paint behaviors in a lightweight manner. Our goal is not to exactly duplicate watercolor painting, but to create a range of dynamic behaviors that allow users to achieve a similar style of process and result, while at the same time having a unique character of its own. Our stroke representation is vector based, allowing for rendering at arbitrary resolutions, and our procedural pigment advection algorithm is fast enough to support painting on slate devices. We demonstrate our technique in a commercially available slate application used by professional artists. Finally, we present a detailed analysis of the different vector-rendering technologies available.

Codimensional non-Newtonian fluids

“…One major application area of fluid simulation in high codimensions is painting [Baxter et al 2001;Baxter et al 2004]. Much research has been devoted to creating systems that simulate paint phenomena that occur in high codimensions, such as paint jets [Lee et al 2006], streaks [Chu et al 2010;DiVerdi et al 2013], and color dispersion [Chu and Tai 2005]. These systems produce realistic painting results and support real-time user interaction.…”

Watercolour Rendering of Portraits

“…Several interactive painting tools have been developed for creating watercolour renderings [7,8] that attempt to capture these effects. They use stroke based rendering along with physical models of the painting process.…”

Real‐Time Oil Painting on Mobile Hardware

“…An efficient procedural method for generating watercolour‐like dynamic paint behaviour aimed towards limited computer hardware has recently been proposed by DiVerdi et al . [DKMI13].…”

“…To obtain high-quality output, the physics simulation is coupled to simple implicit modelling and image-based methods. An efficient procedural method for generating watercolour-like dynamic paint behaviour aimed towards limited computer hardware has recently been proposed by DiVerdi et al [DKMI13].…”