Oil painting style

Continuing with the vanitas painting.

The image rendered in Blender is more like a photograph than a painting, so we decided to convert it into an oil painting style.

There are many AI-powered painting-style conversion tools available online and in apps, and they can even convert images to imitate the style of a specific artist. We searched for free tools and tried a few, but unfortunately we couldn’t find anything that satisfied us.

We finally found something that can achieve oil painting style transformation using Blender’s compositing node. This is an existing algorithm called “Kuwahara filter” that Oshiro (@Magryllia) implemented in Blender and shared with us. (Many thanks to Mr. Oshiro)

We immediately obtained this and applied it, and got good conversion results.

The advantage of converting in Blender is that the filter can refer to the shape and normal direction of the object, and the brush strokes will follow that. We can adjust parameters such as the thickness and density of the brush strokes to create the desired image.