Line art experiments

Last night I got the idea of drawing lines or circles on my phone in Brushes and then applying them as textures to objects in Blender, aiming for a nonphotorealistic style without using Freestyle or toon rendering. And I mostly just wanted to see what it would look like.

My first attempt:

Ignoring the tiling issue, the look of the floor intrigued me, so I made a mountain using Blender’s landscape generator and applied the same line texture:

At this point I realized I could avoid the tiling issue by writing a script to make a line texture for me, at the larger resolution I needed it at. (Update: I’ve posted the Python code for the script.) Here are some of the output textures:

Which gave me a mountain that looked like this:

Not perfect, but not too bad, either. I can see myself using the technique in some illustrations down the road. Here’s a turntable animation of the mountain:

Finally, for the heck of it, I set the displace attribute on the texture and re-rendered:

Kind of like pen and ink, almost.