As a programmer who dabbles in painting, what you are describing is indirect lighting and subsurface scattering (leaves are sort of transparent, so from the back they look yellowish, and the sky is blue, so shadows have some blue in them).

In a full rendering pipeline (not the simplified one just for the effect) this would already be implemented, but it's a good thing to remember.

To be fair to the (epic) work of the author, a spacecraft likely wouldn’t have darks off to blue. I recon balancing the color was within their means and is likely their stylistic choice.

He's on blue sky https://bsky.app/profile/maxime.bsky.social

https://blog.maximeheckel.com/rss.xml

Yeah, I just had to open twitter to be able to give him feedback, which is annoying because it's an otherwise dead platform to me.

I asked him if anyone suggested experimenting with the Symmetric Nearest Neighbor filter[0], which is similar to Kuwahara but works slightly differently. With a little bit of tweaking it can actually embed an unsharp mask-effect into itself, which may eliminate the need for a separate Sobel pass.

I did some javascript-based experiments with SNN here:

https://observablehq.com/@jobleonard/symmetric-nearest-neigh...

... and have no shader experience myself so no idea how it compares to Kuwahara in terms of performance cost (probably worse though).

Hand crafted textures are fine but so’s spending a chunk of time roughly equivalent to hand painting a few models and being able to have any arbitrary geometry rendered in a painterly fashion. You could even figure out a way to combine them, so that the computer can half-ass the parts a master painter would let apprentices handle, and then go back in and do the important parts by hand; I work in Illustrator and figuring out how to make it do half-assed, highly stylized lighting on arbitrary shapes I draw, then doing the rest myself, has been a lot of fun.

> So the point of looking "painterly" is that it looks like the art was done manually by a craftsman.

I don't know that there has to be a point to it in that sense. In general, the goal isn't to generate static images that can be passed off as paintings. It's a real-time 3D rendering technique, for one thing -- you can't paint this.

The term painterly refers to non-photorealistic computer graphics art styles that mimic some aspects of painterly paintings. The point of doing this is to (try to) make a thing (a 3D scene, generally) look the way you want it to.

> So the point of looking "painterly" is that it looks like the art was done manually by a craftsman

I think the core issue is the difference between the digital and the analog as mediums. My understanding is that the computor is not a medium in the real sense. Rather (for the most part) it is a meta-medium: a medium that impersonates other mediums. It impersonates the photographers darkroom, a typewriter, a movie editing station etc.

TFA describes a more effective way to impersonate. It is no more a replacement of a painting than a photograph of my wife is a replacement of my wife.

> But as that gets more common, there will be added value in doing whatever they can't do, because only that will look truly human.

Here I would agree. Standing in front of a real painting is an entirely different experience to looking at a digital emulation of a painting on a screen. My new problem as an art teacher is that I find myself talking to students who claim to have seen the work of (for example) Michelangelo, yet I know they have never visited Italy.