This page descibes how to perform a watercolor rendering on either a 3D animation or a real video source, using the research work achieved by Adrien Bousseau, Joelle Thollot, Fabrice Neyret and David Salesin.

A full project, Night Walkers, was made using this technique and presented to the NPAR 2008 conference.

The watercolorization implies several steps:

Step Software used
1. Compute the optical flow of the video source. AfterEffect, Optical Flow plugin for videos
3DSMax, VeloctyToRGB plugin for 3D animations
2. Choose/create an advection texture that will be used to give the paper grain Photoshop
3. Create the advection stream corresponding to the source AfterEffect, Advect & ForeBack Composit plugins
4. Composite the advection with the source AfterEffect

Note: the format used for all videos is .avi UNCOMPRESSED to get the best results as possible during the process. But in order to save space, all the videos presented here are quicktime .mov compressed with H.264 codec.