Sturdy is a unique, real-time, highly stylized procedural Blender painting shader that reacts with expressive colorful strokes to plain white lights.
That's right, it's not realistic at all. Sturdy looks just great out of the box on both simple and high-detail objects, but despite its wild and gestural nature, you remain in control and can adjust the complexity, the scale, the rotation, and the crunchiness of your brushwork, and nudge color expression by painting with light by using an accent color or by customizing each color of the main palette.
Have a look at some samples made with Sturdy:
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Sturdy
There are no UVs or bitmap textures, everything is procedural, meaning you'll get great detail even when rendering at high resolution.
Brush strokes in Sturdy will look slightly grunge by default, but you may add Brush Crunchiness and control Crunchiness Scale for incremental effect:
Sturdy
Sturdy is based on two main node groups for the Shader Editor, Sturdy and Sturdy+.
With the standard Sturdy node group, you can control color expression by Painting with Light, using an Accent Color, and balancing it with an Overlay Color if necessary, which works great most of the time. But if you want to tweak the shades of the underlying magic palette, you can use the Sturdy+ node group.
You'll find examples of the use of both node groups within the provided Blender files.
Sturdy
Please note, that Sturdy is Eevee only and is compatible with Blender 3.4 and above. Sturdy also comes with a handbook and for any additional information or more pictures, you can check out its creator Paulo Brabo's X/Twitter account.
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