3D Ink Painting

For this project, I wanted to make a three dimensional, living ink painting. I was inspired by the short Jing Hua and traditional ink paintings my parents and grandparents have hanging in their houses.

I did all the modeling procedurally in Houdini and created the ink effects with a combination of shading in Blender and post process effects in After Effects.

Below is a breakdown of how I created it :)

Procedural Modeling

I procedurally modeled everything in Houdini. I just yoinked the pagodas and flowers from my pagoda tool and cherry blossom l-system project (with some quick tweaks to simplify the pagodas and animate the flower blooming). I created the terrain with a heightfield:

I blocked out the overall shape to get the silhouette I wanted.

Then I added a first layer of noise to create the overall mountain shape.

Finally I added a second layer of noise to add rough detail for ink to pool in.

Layout

Once the modeling was done, I did this layout pass with an effect drawover to visualize what my final product would look like. This helped me figure out how I wanted to reveal the scene and what would motivate the ink spreading and camera movement.

I ended up combining the second and third shot so the camera moves smoothly out (instead of cutting) to emphasize the dimensionality of the “painting”. I also changed the camera movement in the last shot so the final position of the camera was more like a composition you’d see in a traditional ink painting.

Ink Effects

To create the ink effect, I used a combination of procedural shading in Blender and post process effects in After Effects. You can see on the left a breakdown of different layers of these passes. In order, I show:

The unshaded mesh
Procedural shading in Blender (simple coloring based on normals)
Blurs and paper texture on top of the procedural Blender Shading
Layering large ink washes on top of the last pass. These large ink areas are created by isolating the darkest parts of the image of the unshaded mesh, clamping their range to low values, and then applying different noises on top of them.
Layering secondary ink washes on top of the last pass. These are created by applying noise patterns similar to the ones used on the large ink washes, but applied to a less heavily processed version of the unshaded mesh, preserving more of the subtle shading details.

And finally I used a pyro spread in Houdini (left) to create a mask for revealing the ink effect. This gave the painting a more convincing 3D feel, as if the ink is traveling over each element in the painting (rather than just wiping uniformly across the screen).