Ghibli Style Smart Materials and Work Flow
For my research project i decided to experiment with smart materials and try to recreate the painted look that you see in studio Ghibli films
For this Example I will be using my work from the Howls Moving Castle Common art project.
To start I followed the Stylized station Ghibli tutorial for the base of my smart materials
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RhW5MwCSjKw
After following the tutorial to make a base material for plaster and tin roof, I gathered more references and color samples from the movie and art book. With these I was able to make variations using different slope filters.
v Below are the first passes of the materials and a extra Smart Material I made for my capstone game that I repurposed as moss and grime.
Smart material folder break down ( duplicate and use this to make a gray metal)
Each smart material starts with a Fill layer that will be the base color.
To get these base colors I took images from the movie and art book and color picked the best area to get an accurate swatch of the color.
After sampling reference images I make a more concentrated color pallet
(For the howls moving castle project I also was tasked with foliage so I also sampled that as well.)
With these swatches i was able to pick a more accurate base color mid color and highlight colors for all the smart materials
From here I only had to do minor tweaks to those colors to make sure the colors blended properly
Example of Wood Smart material
Special not for the wood smart material, There is an extra dark fill layer and that is for after baking wood grain texture on to the mesh. this will add more depth to the texture and make the wood grain pop while also mixing with the brush strokes in the smart material.
second not about this specific material (also includes Rust/Metal SM)
under the blur slope directional filter this allows you to dictate the direction the brush strokes go.
that was if your UV is going a specific direction your able to tweak the smart material to better fit the uv/mesh.
BUT these work best when all like meshes are all facing the same direction that was you can mask multiple meshes to the same smart material ( trust me this keeps substance from shitting it self.)
Examples of the break down for the plaster smart material
and also example of some of the masks used in the mask builder.
NOTE use what ever masks give the look you like then apply the blur slop and it does the painty thing!!
Before layering different masks
After blending different masks and fill layers
File Structure for Tin roof with the generators and filters
Green moss build up with file structure
personally I use this one to had paint the moss with the hair brush brush (shout out to my artsy fartsy back ground uwu painting)
there were some issues using the mask editor with this material for some reason, but I plan to keep experimenting with this one.
If you made it this far... Congratz!
were not done ...
Now your probably thinking these are close to a Ghibli painting style but there missing something...
variation, like yes there variation with paint strokes but it needs more variations in the color.
so these smart materials are actually the underpainting. Some traditional painting fun fact most painters start by adding washes of color to a blank canvas to add dept and variation as they continue to add layers of paint. were doing something similar but in reverse!
If we look at the castle closer you can see that yes the base of the castle is rust which the smart material replicates very well. but there's over washes of color that can be seen across the castle as a whole.
whats the best way to replicate this?
similar to how the moss smart material above! for this adding the mask editor generator is optional.
for this we are going to use another model as an example! Here is sophies castle similar make up of Howls castle. just smaller and made with older parts.
this model uses the same smart materials just color shifted to be more tan.
shown below is smart materials at the bottom that were used to build up an "under painting"
above there are 5 more fill layers with black masks adding blur slop and directional is optional and its if you feel like you need it.
for these you can add mask editors if you want but personally i rather have a little more control and pick and choose where i put these pops of colors.
when working like this its good to have your reference close by
aint he just the cutest
upon looking at the base of the done for sophies castle
you can see small washes of green a pinkish red and a light purple.
after some trial and error the colors i made into fill layers above were close enough to give the look i wanted.
I always start with adding the yellows pinks and oranges
lastly add some greens! now thats youve built up on top of your under painting its looking more like the source material. but hes looking a bit washed out.
when in need to bring back some depth always use purple set to multiply! 9 times out of 10 it blends perfectly and adds nice shading and helps bring out more detail with out loosing the over painting you did!
obviously this is a very quick tutorial and can be continuously build upon. (its 3 am and im looking at this and thinking hmmmmm he needs more reds)
after you give all the other parts of the castle the same treatment it will look something like this!
Here are some shots of the larger version of howls castle in stager and in our scene in engine.
i chose to keep the textures on the vibrant side so when lighting changed from day to night in our common art project you didnt loose any color information and the castles details were still visible.
also make sure rsgb is off so the textures aren't shiny!
See Hannah Martinez' post for common art to see the final product!
