Painterly NPR as Gaussians

A scene rebuilt as soft, oriented Gaussian brush dabs, so it reads as paint instead of polygons.

Techniques

• Points are scattered over the surface, and each becomes a flat Gaussian dab lying along the form
• Dab size follows the local point spacing and tightens where the surface curves, so flat areas get lazy strokes and edges get tight ones
• Colour and opacity are authored per dab in VEX, baked to standard Gaussian splat attributes and drawn by Houdini 21's native splat renderer
• A modern take on painterly rendering with oriented brush strokes (Meier, SIGGRAPH 1996), built without any training or plugins

Sources

• LinkedIn: Summer Learning Program thank you ↗

Source scene: the Blender 4.0 splash artwork by Gaku Tada, CC BY-SA.