About the Toolkit

Inspiration & References

These toolkits were heavily inspired by traditional painting mediums, illustrations, the look of classic and modern stylized animated films. The first step of development was figuring out which art styles would translate best into a 3D pipeline. I spent a lot of time analyzing different 2D mediums, looking at how the artist handle light, shadow, and line work to see which workflows would be the most interesting and possible to recreate as a procedural toolset. I collected a wide range of references, focusing on styles that organic and far away from standard clean CG. Below are some of the initial reference styles, illustrations, and art directions I contemplated during this R&D phase.

Out of all the directions I explored, I focused on two specific looks: a high-contrast monochromatic dotted/stippling style effect and a painterly effect. 

Monochromatic Dotted Style/Stippling

For the dotted toolkit, I was mainly inspired by the traditional and digital ink stippling artworks of illustrator Soman, but also by pieces from Giulio Campagnola and Nicolas Delort, even though his work focuses more on lines rather than dots.

To demonstrate how closely a 3D procedural toolkit can recreate these aesthetics, I decided to replicate Soman's piece "Twinkling and Moving." This allowed me to analyze the results side by side while adding my own creative twist using custom effects developed in Houdini.

In a nutshell, the main toolkit operates in two core parts:

• Point Generator: This first node gives you all the necessary parameters to create and control the overall mask, as well as an edge mask that the points are scattered onto.

• Mono Dots COP: The second node takes all the information from the Point Generator and processes it into a 2D form, which you can then layer to get the desired look.

For the dotted toolkit, I was mainly inspired by the traditional and digital ink stippling artworks of illustrator Soman, but also by pieces from Giulio Campagnola and Nicolas Delort, even though his work focuses more on lines rather than dots.

To demonstrate how the toolkit recreates these styles (as close as a 3D procedural toolkit can), I decided to recreate Soman's piece of work "Twinkling and Moving" to see the results side by side. In a nutshell, the main toolkit works in two parts:

• Point Generator: This first node gives you all the necessary parameters to create and control the overall mask, as well as an edge mask that the points are scattered onto.

• Mono Dots COP: The second node takes all the information from the Point Generator and processes it into a 2D form, which you can then layer to get the desired look.

Final Result

Painterly Style

Although there exist tools to create a painterly look in other programs like Blender, I wanted to create my own version of a painterly tool for Houdini users. I wanted to focus the toolkit to capture the loose, tactile brushwork found in traditional painting and animation like Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. While also giving the users the option to make it look more like a 2D or 3D style.

The first tool creates different masks to create the sections of these layered effects; they essentially act as the lighting of the geometry, so masks control the placement of the highlights, shadows, specular, and so on. This masking tool gives the user complete control of the brushstroke placement.

For the second tool/node, it is a geometry deformation. It is broken down into 3 areas: one where you can stylize the geometry by deforming the original geometry, another where you can reduce the polygons to get a simplified geometry, and the last one takes your geometry and sharpens its topology by pinching areas with high curvature.

And lastly, for the third tool/node, the "Brush Stroke Applicator" takes all that information from the other 2 nodes and uses them for the placement of the brush strokes. With this tool, the user can control everything to do with the brush stroke: the shape, size, deformation, direction, among many other features.

Once again, to demonstrate the success of the painterly tool, I decided to recreate a piece of art. This time I chose a piece by Alex Henderson, the illustration found in the center above.

Final Result