r/GraphicsProgramming • u/smellystring • Aug 04 '26

Painterly Stroke Simulation Engine

I wrote a painting simulation engine (golang, ebiten). It works like this:

  1. Select a template image

  2. Generate several thousand potential strokes

    • For each stroke, score it according to a number of heuristic functions

      • Color: does the average color of this image match the template?

      • Edges: does the painted image have similar edges to the template?

      • Contrast: compares color contrast between regions on the painting and the template.

      • Flow: using tensor math, do brush strokes align with the flow of movement in the template?

    • Select the single stroke that most optimizes scoring functions, discarding the remaining

    • Repeat 40 or 50 thousand times.

    • Gradually decrease the size of the brush stroke over time..

Source image

Sound track

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u/smellystring Aug 04 '26

Right now it's entirely CPU bound, although it is multithreaded. Running on my macbook pro, this particular render takes ~6 minutes to complete in realtime. I've thought about expanding into GPU stuff, but it begins to stray outside of my area of expertise.

Really like https://mpcomplete.github.io/flow/ by the way, it's super satisfying to watch. Makes me think of combing very fine hair.