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Kuwahara painterly filter

In your harnessGodot shaderMIT

Turn the rendered scene into a painting: for each pixel, four overlapping square regions are compared and the mean colour of the region with the least variance wins, which flattens areas into strokes while keeping edges.

Render of Kuwahara painterly filter
The render its check recorded in Godot 4.7.2, 256 by 256 pixels.

What it takes and gives

Shader type
spatial
Render modes
unshaded, cull_disabled, depth_test_disabled, depth_draw_never, skip_vertex_transform, fog_disabled
Parameters
screen_texture (sampler2D), radius (int = 4), sample_spacing (float = 1), saturation (float = 1.2)
Use it on
A MeshInstance3D with a 2 x 2 QuadMesh, material.tres as its material override and a large extra cull margin, as in demo.tscn.
Result
The scene smoothed into flat painterly patches with crisp boundaries between objects.
Renderers
compatibility: compiled and rendered, forward plus: not verified, mobile: not verified
Placement
res://baltor/godot_shaders/post_kuwahara_painterly/

Limits. Cost is (2r + 1) squared samples per pixel: radius 4 reads 81 samples, radius 8 reads 289, which is heavy at high resolution. Square regions produce blocky artefacts at large radii (anisotropic variants avoid them). The pass reads Godot's screen texture after opaque geometry, so transparent objects drawn after it are not processed and its order among other transparent passes is not controlled.

Details

Kind
Godot shader
Engine
Godot 4.3 or later
Files
11 files, 63.5 KB
Licence
MIT
Declared effects
reads files, runs commands
Checked with
Godot 4.7.2, opengl3 compatibility (Mesa llvmpipe, Xvfb)
Checks
contract static, engine run, engine log clean, shader in scene, capture written, render not uniform, shader changes pixels
Techniques
Kuwahara filter (four-quadrant minimum variance mean, Kuwahara et al. 1976)
Tags
godot shader, spatial, post-process, kuwahara, painterly, oil painting, filter, full-screen
Identity
library.supply.creative_originals.e675e75e6ad164df991ed6b4.1d35496f42007e50
Version
1d35496f42007e508cfa301b2ba95c1d035292ad171b2b1379d19858df323ed8

The version is the SHA-256 of the item your harness downloads; every file in it names its own checksum.

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