I had an idea yesterday. I played around a little.. 15 minutes and came up with this. With some work you could do some pretty cool stuff.

??????
what it this? it looks beautiful. Can it be animated?

Wow it's so soft looking. How done!?

Yep... easily animated and easily done.

Whatever "animated painting you want" render the animation as a quicktime or whatever. Make a plain and apply a hair mat.. Play with the hair thickness, length and transparency. Brush the strokes the way you want. Apply a decal as a diffuse map to control the hair color. tweek and render.

No shadows.. and diffuse falloff turned down. For softer apply a bloom to the camera.. and for even softer you could use Images as the paint strokes.

Its all very similar to the way most fractal paint plugins work.. except you have complete control over the direction of the strokes and their thickness, shape and length.

To animate.. you could use a wind or just vary the direction of the hairs and their position.

You could create VanGogh swirls by adding control points and making them swirl.. lots of possibilities.

C

Very nice example of creative thinking applied to hair!

Very pretty Colin - I will guess that it is hair - with a decal (or some material) driving the color - I very much like the idea of using hair for creating more abstract images - one could use shape emitters that look like thick oil paint (with ridges for brush lines) - or perhaps translucent water color washes

(EDIT- I guessed - but obviously way toooo slow)

Here is another.. More water Color like.

and here is the original image I used to control the color.. some might recognize it.

I'm intrigued by the water color one - is that done with Bloom? do tell puhleeze.

you are a genius!

Thats a straight render.. no bloom.

Just modified the lights and took down the diffuse falloff. Oh I also lengthened the hair/stroke... I realised that when you shorten it.. you loose the shape you create by modifying the thickness.. and also loose the transparency.. I applied the trans over the length of the stroke. No trans at bottom.. full trans at end.

Hope that helps.

I'll play more later. Now I have to go play... I mean work.

C

Brilliant, Colin!

I love those Colin. This could easily be framed.

Thanks guys,

its just the beginning of a process. With some thought (more than 15 minutes) put into it.. it seems it would be quiet easy to simulate all sorts of textures and paint styles.

It would be cool to see the particle engines in the Materials part of AM make a jump to the compositer in version 12 as well. All sorts of effects could result.

Thanks for the encouragement.. I'll keep playing.

C

i´m realy thankful for this brilliant idea. I played a little bit around, using the same picture, some hair. I put it on the model i used for "high terminator" and than increse the model transparence to 100%. Looks like an icefigure moving around.
Hope not to highjack your subject.
Greetings

Gaarrgh! You beat me to it!! The use of hair to simulate brush strokes was going to be one of my aces. Good work.

This could make for some really nice animations. Have you tried using the same thing but with the image driving the direction as well?

It should be possible to render an animatoin and then use that as an animated decal to get things looking pretty funky.

Can't wait to see more.

Some more. I think I'm getting the hang of this.

I kinda liked the Hardware version of that last one as well.

and another with thicker strokes.

wow again, can you send the prj file for study?

wow colin .. i'd love to see animation of that ..
just imagine an image of a hill, forest on it and blue sky with white clouds
maybe like this one, but a bit photoshopping to do


and then use it as a background for some character animation ..
this would be a great entry for the upcoming "mood shot" hash animation contest ..

I was thinking just now that it would be good if it were possible to set the hairs to be a different thickness depending on how detailed the image was. This would make it look more like a real paintng and would give a little more clarity also. I could also speed up the render as it would mean that you could have fewer hairs and still get a good picture.

A workaround for this with existing tools might be to seperate the image in photoshop into a version which represents the detail and a version that represents the plainer areas. Maybe the edge filters could come in handy there.

Then you could create two emmiters, one with larger hairs and fewer of them, and one for denser, smaller hairs.

An improvement would be if it were possible to have an image map control the width of hairs.

It should be possible also for a programmer to write a filter plugin that would do 'find edges' and then work out what angle a line is at by observing surrounding pixels, then the hairs could be made to run allong the lines.

One of my favorite effects scenes of all time is the painted heaven in "What dreams may Come" I'm going to see if I can simulate that in 3d with this effect.

This is as much fun as I've had in a loooonnnng time.

C

yep I'll post a prj for study later. I'm off to work right now

C

These are coming out just beautifully - wonderful!!

It is beginning to look as van Gogh... not bad...
It is decorative... and expressiv...
An animation with some music to it could be nice...
There is lip-sync in A:M but music sync is still missing...
A little C-coding of some bright one and we could have that too?
I am waiting for your .prj-file to have a try myself...

OMG those are cool- what an intriguing idea. Very generous of you to share it with us!

Here is an animation using this effect. I made the hairs quite short and thier directoin is controlled by the map. I am thinking that it woul be a good idea to blur the frames so as to avoid jitteryness when they suddenly change. It was rendered in raltime shaded which looks pretty good and renders much faster.

http://www.hash.com/users/keates/Furthom.mov

Here is a version where I used the blur post effect to get rid if the jittering. The effect can be applied to the image that is driving the hair without having to render it. This means that you can see how it looks then easily adjust the blur level.

Oh yea, I used a coloured light to tie the colours in nicely.

I am thinking that it would be nice to be able to control many more of the hair properties with image maps. For instance, you might want a nasty character to have small, spikey hairs and a nice character to have larger softer ones.

Both phases of this render technique work well enough in realtime shaded mode so a few passes for different properties could be rendered without having to worry too much about render times.

http://www.hash.com/users/keates/Furthomsmooth.mov

John -

What would happen if you used a light (i.e., a light with an image in it) to project the image of Thom walking on the hair background rather than controlling the color map directly?

It would make the jittering go away - but it would take a bit of experimentation I think to get the look down.

Ok me too, me too...Used an image of 3 orange-yellow circles for an emitter on a distorted grid decaled with an image - 100%ambiance for the grid, purple reflective ground plane

Title: Sun Spots in My Eyes

Here's the emitter

Cool!!!

You are one step ahead of me now. I've got a test render going doing the same thing on a mapped image.

C

Heres some examples how emitter can change the look

green yarn fern

Blue fish eye

Sheep curl

LAST one - promise

Monnnnaaaayyyyy!!!

Oh yeah, nancy, I love what you are doing there.

This is my first image, using CCT "Colins Cool Technique"

..and the first animation:

We have a name for it:
A:M Hash use CCT. This is a good slogan.
Greetings

Here's are some technique names!

PTCWAH

PHT

LM! NDC!

p.s. Maybe I should do a top ten and we can have a vote...

Vernon "!" Zehr

Anyone else getting an excited shiver down their spine?

I'm getting a little shiver down my spine... this is so cool...

---------

I have an idea that is not a paint technique... but I want to try it... if it works will post in another thread... but..

I noticed on one of the early examples how the "hairy paint" was flowing and moving, almost as in a breeze, by the changing light and dark in the shadow under thom...

..Couldn't this technique be used to control the hair direction? As if it were being blown by a strong wind across a field of grass. That might be easier to control than using a force. You would use an animated greyscale fuzzy blob... and it would sweep across the hair emitter...

Vernon "!" Zehr

Hey vern, I like where you are going with that idea.

Here is an animtion that I made which is the result of me trying to solve the problem of how to get the hairs to change direction allong outlines. I will make another thread for it because it looks quite nice.

http://www.hash.com/users/keates/Rainbowlines.avi

Heres how I did it:

I made a thom who was just white with 100% ambiance. I made the background and his eyes black. Then I rendered out the result.

Then I loaded the animation frames and used a blur post effect on them at its highest value. Then I saved those frames ans an animation.

Pant pant...

Then I Applied the resulting animation as a decal and made it a bimp map.

Then I put that object into a chor and made a sun light set up with 8 suns all angled at different directions and of different colours.

... I think that is it.

I will later try using this to alter the direction of the hiars.

Hey vern, you gave me an idea. It would be possible to have a scene which looks just like it is a garden with grass and flowers but then you would use an animated decal to move the grass and suddenly you have some kind of story being told in the grass. Maybe the flowers could be one character and the grass another?

Here is the animation using the rainbow lines to effect the hair directoin and a simple colour version of the animation for the diffuse. I put a unifying colour under the hair and lit the thing with a similar colour. I might change the density of the guide hairs to fill in the gaps later. You get two lighting setups, one from the original render and one from the hair scene.

http://www.hash.com/users/keates/Furthom3.mov

Hey colin, I know that you are the expert on hair direction colour maps. I would really like to get the hiar running allong the direction of the lines but I couldn't find a reference for which colour causes which direction.

Hey Aaver, that movie has a nice feel to it. With just a little more work, AM could be marketed as a video editing suite with painterly effects.

Wow.. its cool to see you guys running with the idea.

here's some more from my side. and a project.

A Seurat style scene...

Seurat style

and an oily one... (which I liked allot)



Oil painting

Here is a movie of the same shot.. I animated the direction and position of the hair over time.

Scenic Mov


and here are examples of all of the projects I've posted so far.. with images.

painting projects

oh and I finally found a use for my hair normals program. It works great for painting paint swirls! Here is the app.

HairBrush

and a sample of the map I painted for the above pictures.

paint direction map

Its hard to tell, but there are strokes in the pic. I just turned on the random Green function to give the hairs more random tweeks.

C