Microghost Paintify Shader
Hello everyone!
My most advanced shader yet is here. Also an addon to easily use the kuwahara filter for image textures. The idea with this shader is that I wanted to make it super compatible with a lot of different workflows, so whether you want to use it with premade assets, with texture painting, or just as is, it should be easy.
The material is set up so that you don't need to UV unwrap, texture paint, or use the compositor for it to work (although all of that is supported).
EEVEE Examples
The shader comes with twelve 4k seamless textures that I painted, packed into an easy to use material, so that you can quickly create a wide variety of painterly effects.
Cycles Examples
Everything in the shader is fully compatible with both EEVEE and Cycles. The asset also comes with a displacement effect, and an outline effect, with full animation controls.
Kuwahara Addon
When I'm making painterly scenes, a lot of times I want to be able to use a high quality Kuwahara filter on my image textures without having to leave Blender, so I made a simple addon, located in the image editor, to do so. There's a CPU mode, which is slow (often 2+ minutes) but high quality, and a GPU mode, which makes use of Blender's realtime compositor (only in 4.2+ I believe). The GPU mode is basically instant but tends to cause artifacts.
INSTALLATION:
Simply drag the .blend file into your asset browser, and find it by searching "microghost" or "paintify". To use the effect, drag the asset into your project, select the desired object and the asset object, and hit CMD/CTRL L, and 'link materials' and 'copy modifiers'.
The kuwahara addon is installed like any other addon. Just install the zip through the addon manager in preferences, or if you're on blender 4.2+, just drag it into any blender window.
I'll include a demo file with the materials from the Cycles example seen above.
I'm attaching a zip with all the image textures as well, but you don't have to download that, I'm just including it for those who want it.
Happy blending! Let me know what you think and if you want me to change anything. I really appreciate the tips that you guys have given me, that's very sweet of you. If people tip for this, it will be going towards Rebelle 7 so that I can make my future effects even more realistic and detailed.