To recreate painted textures with computer code, I knew I had to start by studying human artisans first. I wanted to focus on replicating a color transition technique painters use between regions of shadow and light, saturating the boundary. This features prominently with translucent surfaces like skin, and is a stylization painters can employ with solid surfaces too. While designing this system, I was able to learn from the knowledge of craftsman outside my field to attack the problem at hand.

With a plan formulated, I just had to implement it. Starting with a scene (1), I used Blender to bake lightmaps as a reference texture (2). I discovered global illumination is a must to achieve the soft haziness of paint. A custom brush engine brush then applies a base layer of color with curved strokes (3). Next, my engine proceeds to mark out the shadow-light boundaries and strokes the region with a saturated midtone (4). Now what the global illumination from before does is "expand" the shadow-light boundary ever so slightly—such that the color bleeds into the shadows.