✨Arcane Acquired✨

God truly does provide! Since my last post about rest, I took a day off, and had a new idea about how to achieve a universal painterly shader that can be applied to any object. My goal was to make this shader as versatile as possible, adjustable to become whatever material you'd need it to be. But it had a big flaw...

😶The Flaw: Rather than treating each brush stroke like a single normal direction as I had hoped, the shader calculated the height of each "grit" of a brush stroke, which resulted in a lot of tiny shadows and highlights. This made the first iteration look more photorealistic and plastic than intended.

🖌️The Solution: But on my day of rest, I had a new idea for how to achieve a much more stylized result but painting textures in specific colors that blender would understand as normal directions, rather than just painting in grayscale. And thanks be to Jesus, it absolutely worked! I believe this is the closest I've ever gotten to creating shaders in the Arcane style, and it all had to do with the normals. But I'll let you be the judge of that when I release it!

🪙The Bonus: In addition, after some work, and some more refinements after a conversation on Discord with Eternal Skies, I also found a very simple way to get "polished" lighting with that soft red edge effect, which I will be making a tutorial on next week for everybody here on Patreon!

I am so happy to give credit to Cal Calilie for asking me for help making a Universal Paint, I definitely couldn't have come up with any of this without you showing me references and sharing your thoughts about it! Once I finalize all the 50+ features for this shader this week, I'll be releasing it for free to all Elder Mug Members, and I'll also be uploading it to the shop for $5 (single seat commercial license)!

I hope you're all excited for this bonus shader, and the higher quality asset packs that will come out of this as a result!

Elder Mug Members, if you want any help figuring out how to make specific stylized shaders or effects in blender, go over to the exclusive #✨elder-chat✨ on Discord and ask! I can't promise I'll be able to make it, but I will definitely try. And if I succeed, I'll share it with you for free 😁

You can find the invite links in these posts:

All Patreon Member Discord Invites: https://www.patreon.com/collection/2345089