Making 3D animation look painterly (it's easier than you think)

In this video, I'll go over a surprisingly simple way to make your stylized 3D renders feel like a painting. I do it by painting over Object Space Normal Maps, which is not as scary as it sounds. This technique allows us to capture the feeling of a 2D painting while maintaining the flexibility of 3D.

I used Blender, Substance Painter, Substance Designer, and Rebelle to make the stylized tea kettle scene.

Thanks for watching :)

Chapters:

0:00 Intro
0:18 Top Five Favorite Things (about this technique)
2:19 Prerequisites
2:50 3 Basic Steps
3:05 Demo
4:30 Why does this work?
5:30 How Normals Work
6:39 Base color?
7:27 Conversions

Frequently Asked Questions

How do you paint World Space in Substance Painter/How do you paint on two channels at the same time?

In this video, I'm painting on a custom channel. The only reason it's "world" is because that's what I named it. Substance has no idea what it actually is and you can't preview it as a normal map in the software. You'll have to export it to your renderer to test it.

How do you convert your painted object space map to tangent space?

You can just bake it again to a new image texture, but this time in tangent space. Just make sure your painterly object space normal map is plugged into your shader when you do it.

Can I do this procedurally or semi-procedurally?

Yeah! Check out these videos:

Can I paint the normal map in Blender?

Yes! Check out these videos:

#3danimation #blender3d #blender #blendertutorial #3dart #3d #painting #vfx #substancepainter #b3d #stylized

[codygindy]

Thanks for watching! I added some answers to frequently asked questions in the description :)

[nikkoa.]

Reminds me of when the Arcane artists talked about creating the effect. The interview went something like "How did you get that painted effect" "we painted it"

[Andrejs.sosenko]

Dude said "its not as complicated as you think" and it do be more complicated than me think

[Artem.Kak.Art.]

For blender users: a modified voronoi texture is actually really good at imitating the real brush strokes. So you can connect the position of the texture into the color of the Normal map node (better to lower the strength to less then 0.5). Set the voronoi to smooth and lower the smoothness to around 0.1. Then connect the Mapping node to the vector of the voronoi. There you can see a Location socket. Plug there a Noise texture. To control the strength of it, use Vector math node set to Scale. That’s the basic concept, play with it. You can and different Noise or other textures to Location/Rotation/Scale for even more stylisation. Last thing: group all this big node tree, duplicate it, change its settings connect those two with Mix Color node. Possibilities are infinite!

[PixelCherries]

I've been OBSESSED with non photoreal rendering for a while now, and seeing this painterly normal map technique initially just sparks so much inspiration in me. Thank you, this is so cool! Looking forward to learn more about this stuff :D

[FrostysChannel]

Dude popped out of no where and dropped a more well made tutorial than pretty much all other blender/3D tutorial YouTubers 😂 🎉

[exyl_sounds]

im amazed how this video is so insanely followable for both beginners and advanced blender users

[JakeInMotion]

Cody, you have such a talent for explaining complex concepts in simple language! Thank you so much for this video and I hope to learn more from you in the future.

[vrheadroom]

After seeing your first video on Instagram I started experimenting with this technique. I’m my experiments I’ve found it looks really good if you create 3 slightly different normal maps, with the normal map animated to change between them every 3 frames

[adicsbtw]

I think a good way to keep the colors identical between multiple maps would be to pain in UV coordinates, then use that as a vector input to the raw, unaltered texture maps. That would give you the ability to change the brush strokes, color, object shape, and even metalic or roughness textures to match with the brush strokes

[gabbycotto]

I fell in love with the idea of 3D animation done to look like 2D, so I am absolutely here for this technique and hope you make many more tutorials along these lines in the future.

[JMach]

Definitely one of those "light bulb" videos. Such a simple and straight-forward way to achieve that look, regardless of the tools used. Awesome video!

[ruandemeneses]

i work with drawing commissions, one thing ou can do to match the normals with de albedo/base color is do the normals first, then you save one copy of the normals in .png file(with the original normal saved ), grab the normal that you will transform in base color and put saturation to 0, you will have a perfect copy of your normal but pintable and in grayscale, than you use the option "clipping mask" in your grayscaled normal and paint of with no fear to smud or destroy everything

ps: english is not my primary language, so please, forgive the syntax errors

[badxstudio]

Didn't know it was this easy to achieve a look like this. We first tried to look for similar ways after watching "ARCANE" and now knowing we can ... it's awesome! Thanks Cody

[chizu]

This man has 1 video and 2 shorts and has already taught me more then I learned in my first year of college for 3D animation

[pchris]

THIS IS SO MIND BLOWINGLY SMART! I can't believe I've never thought of this! It's such a cool use of normal maps and should work in any game engine, not just 3D rendering software!

[penn]

For creating a base color texture with the same brush strokes as your normal map, I believe you could achieve it with gradient maps! Just convert the normal map to black and white and then apply your desired gradient map on top. This way you aren't doing any more manual painting, it's all just filters on top of your normal map strokes! And it's all done on one layer!

[JacobHalton]

This is explained SO well. There's a lot here I haven't learned yet, but you did a great job at explaining the things needed to learn to get to the final result, so now I have a list of stuff to learn in order to practice your painted method. Thanks so much for making this, looking forward to more of your work!

[derkaesekuchen]

Woah, I never thought we can use a normal map like this - Thank you for sharing! It's indeed fascinating technique!

[spiritualcadence]

Man I’m so glad that the blender community is a thing lmao. Thanks you so much! I’m definitely gonna implement this into my workflow!