
A Generative Approach to Simulating Watercolor Paints from Scratch - GarethX
https://blog.paytonturnage.com/water_color
======
lanewinfield
Reminds me of the (absolutely beautiful) watercolor maps by Stamen Design:

[https://hi.stamen.com/watercolor-
process-3dd5135861fe](https://hi.stamen.com/watercolor-process-3dd5135861fe)

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dahart
> In my seven years of programming I have had the most fun in the past few
> months after discovering generative art.

Careful! It's totally addictive. Next thing you know, you'll be spending
thousands on high res prints, or even worse, making it your day job _and_ your
hobby. ;)

Nice work! It looks great, and I'm looking forward to more.

~~~
noelwelsh
I feel myself getting this addiction. Can you say more about what kind of day
jobs use these techniques?

I realise that to achieve good results requires time, and the easiest way to
find time is to spend working hours on it, so I'm considering pushing my
consultancy in a direction that includes this kind of work---though I'm not
actually sure what this is!

~~~
GuiA
Design teams at large companies that have a strong design culture, ad
agencies, and design studios working on contract work (particularly
installations for music events etc) are the kind of day jobs where you can
work on these kind of things.

It definitely takes some time (and a lot of personal work) to break in in this
field though. Like most artistic practices sold to the Market, deadlines are
usually tight, pay isn't the highest, and there are more people who would like
to make a full time living from it than there is available paid work.

Get in a routine (make things with regularity, many artists make something
daily), make your work public (post it on Instagram/Twitter/art
subreddits/etc.), make it clear that you're available for paid work, and after
some time you might make it happen. Good luck!

~~~
noelwelsh
Thanks!

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spankalee
Back in a college graphics class I had a lot of fun, and some lucky success,
with roughly simulating watercolors with GL shaders. I kept several textures
that represented the paper, it's wetness, and the paint. The shader would
calculate new states for each based on the previous state, time and user
input.

The cool thing was that you could watch the paint disperse in real time and
could add things like gravity to cause it to drip down the page.

It wasn't physically that accurate, but it looked pretty good and was super
fun to hack on. If only I could find the source :(

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gene-h
This reminds me of this one Siggraph paper where they did full bristle and
fluid level simulation of paint and a paint brush[0][1].

[0][http://web.cse.ohio-
state.edu/~wang.3602/Chen-2015-WB/Chen-2...](http://web.cse.ohio-
state.edu/~wang.3602/Chen-2015-WB/Chen-2015-WB.pdf)
[1][https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-foZ64bIxEw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-foZ64bIxEw)

~~~
enervate
I haven't used corel painter in a long time but I hope at they took this as
some sort of inspiration about how paint mixes.

~~~
pasta
Verve painter is a great app for this kind of sim.

[http://www.taron.de/forum/](http://www.taron.de/forum/)

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hungerstrike
It's too bad that e-ink never really went anywhere. I'd love to have low-
power/no-power, random, dynamic, full-color paintings hung up around my house.

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kitanata
Reminds me of this research paper by Adobe and their approach to bringing
Water Color painting to Illustrator on the iPAD.

[https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1598012&dl=ACM&coll=DL&CF...](https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1598012&dl=ACM&coll=DL&CFID=848256239&CFTOKEN=82651607)

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hidenotslide
Nice idea, here's a little WebGL version inspired by your post. I just used a
noise function rather than the polygons though.
[https://www.shadertoy.com/view/lt2BRm](https://www.shadertoy.com/view/lt2BRm)

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akx
Ah, I made something similar back when that original article came out. Should
have maybe fleshed it out and posted on HN?
[https://github.com/akx/watercolour](https://github.com/akx/watercolour)

~~~
akx
(Edit, in case anyone's still reading: here's the dist version. Refresh for
another blob.
[https://akx.github.io/watercolour/](https://akx.github.io/watercolour/))

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swayvil
This is a major generative art nexus right here :
[http://reddit.com/r/generative](http://reddit.com/r/generative)

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graham1776
Is there a website like codepen or jsfiddle to build and show off generative
art in javascript? Would be a fun little community.

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billfruit
Are you able to generate dry brush type of strokes?

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stuaxo
Very nice !

