Painterly

RenderMan Stylized Looks Presets | Painterly

This style embraces the visible brushstrokes and rich textures of traditional oil or acrylic painting, while incorporating bold outlines reminiscent of old newspaper comics, adding a playful, cartoonish touch.

Painterly uses an OSL shader to drive the color. So when loading the preset make sure the OSL is loaded.

1. Scene Setup

A 3D wireframe model of a top view of a coffee cup on a saucer with a spoon, shown on a gray grid background.

The scene setup is composed of a single light source with basic material applied for each object.

2. Material Setup

There is also the usual PxrStylizedControl node with:

PxrManifold2D as I’ll be driving the mapping of the brushes using the surface UV, and also to fine tune the the frequency of the hatching for individual objects.
2x PxrFractal nodes that are used to distort the line-work on U and V.
A PxrFractal is plugged into the line thickness to vary the line width of our line art.
A PxrBump is used to vary the shading zones when using PxrStylizedToon

The PxrManifold arrangement along with the two fractal nodes is the standard setup for all of my stylized shading looks. And they are the standard for all of the artistic presets in this pack. I might add additional nodes such as the bump map to control the PxrStylizedToon output and various fractal or worley nodes to control the line width and line masking depending on the desired look.

For Maya I have created scripts that either plug a PxrManifold2D into an existing PxrStylizedControl or allows me to call out the attribute of PxrStylizedControl or PxrManifold2D from an object as I tweak those controls constantly while developing the looks. You can download these scripts from this github repo.

The shading network has a new node connected to the diffuse channel of the main PxrSurface. This node is an OSL that does a painterly effect.

You give an initial color, the color of color value of the brush stroke and the noise texture to drive the effect.

The texture driving it is a Multitexture mapped using PxrHexTileManifold so it maps randomly.

3. AOVs and LPEs

This look doesn’t require any additional AOVs or LPEs other than the default Stylized Looks AOVs.

4. Stylized Layers

The color palette for this style semi dark color with analogues hues.

To achieve the sketching look the display filters are composed of the following categories layered in order:

1x PxrStylizedToon filter to produce the desired toon stepping AOV. It will be used as a signal for specific hatching filters downstream.
2x PxrStylizedHatching filters produce describe the painterly brush look
1x PxrStylizedLines filter to produce the desired line-work
1x PxrStylizedHatching filter for shadow overlay pass

These layers are showcased and described below:

0. Beauty Pass

This is the result of the shading coming out of the OSL with our single light source and 0 indirect bounces.

1. PxrStylizedToon - Shading

We’ll take our beauty signal and define the coverage of our steps and how many steps do we need downstream.

2. PxrStylizedHatching - Primer

This hatching pass doesn’t add brushes. The brushes are already on the surface from the OSL and what we are trying to do is to have a uniform base without any shading or shadows that would allows us to layer the PxrStylizedToon signal output on top of this layer downstream using a slide. As such you’ll notice that the hatching filter has the Toon Mode enabled.

3. PxrStylizedHatching - Shadows

As the layer above this hatching layer uses Toon Mode, so that means the output is pure color. The signal input however is NPRtoonOut AOV which is the output of the PxrStylizedToon layer. We’re compositing this hatching over the color using a Multiply node to get those dark shadows and we can dial it to taste.