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Building a Watercolor Render

I used a VR-sculpted theater, hand-painted textures, and RenderMan’s new painterly tools to make a live 3D render feel like watercolor.

  • RenderMan XPU / Painterly rendering / VR sculpting / Stylized looks

The transformation

One stage. Three ways of seeing it.

01Fully rendered
02The white model
03Watercolor

The geometry is the same. The camera is the same. But the image has crossed from a physical render into something that feels painted. That transformation is the magic here.

So, how did I get there?

RenderMan had a new painterly brush system coming to XPU, and my job was to put it to the test. Somebody had to do it.

I began with the obvious experiment: apply the brush to an ordinary physically based scene. The result was still an ordinary physically based render, only blurrier around the edges. It looked filtered, not painted.

False start 01The first test started with a conventional PBR scene. Painterly marks alone were not enough.

It didn’t cut it. The mistake was assuming watercolor could be added at the end.

A convincing watercolor look could not begin with the final filter. It had to be built into every step.

Start handmade

I began with a vaudeville theater I had sculpted in Adobe Substance 3D Modeler. It took about eleven hours in VR. The ornament is loose, lopsided and a little excessive—the kind of model that already carries fingerprints before it has any color.

Stage 01VR-sculpted geometry. Handmade character before the shader work begins.

Then I painted the model by hand with watercolor textures. The goal was not to hide the 3D object. It was to give the renderer the same kinds of variation that make pigment on paper feel alive: uneven color, soft edges, patches where the surface shows through.

Stage 02Color is painted into the object, not added as a finishing effect.

Let light behave like paint

A conventional diffuse render still felt too solid. I colored the shadows, then piped the painted textures through glow. The light began to lift the pigment instead of polishing the surfaces. It felt less like a miniature set under studio lights and more like a wash drying on paper.

Stage 03Colored shadow and glow loosen the physical render.

Brush, line, depth

Now the new tools had something useful to work with. I applied the painterly brush through camera depth, so the marks could respond to the scene instead of sitting flat across the image. Then I rendered a separate line treatment.

Pass APainterly brush through camera depth
Pass BStylized lines, rendered separately

The final image is the layers working together: modeling, painted texture, colored shadow, glow, brush and line. No single one of them is the watercolor look. The look is the system.

Evidence 01The layered look runs in RenderMan XPU as a live render—not a flattened paint-over.

I could light it and compose it interactively while looking at final pixels. That is the real promise of new rendering technology: not simply doing the old thing faster, but discovering a thing I could not have made the year before.