Style Cookbook

Build your own art style from small, stackable look blocks instead of picking one from a menu. Every block fills one of ten slots (surface, light, fill, tone, line, colour, ground, time, raster, medium), any block swaps for another in its slot, and every block shares one paper, one held clock and marks that stay on things as the camera moves. The stack lives in the scene, so every player sees the same look, and it comes off in one call.

What is in this world

• paperBlocks (new): the papers a look is drawn on.
  • Seventeen papers as Ground blocks: cold press, rough, hot press, rice paper, newsprint, kraft, parchment, canvas, illustration board, blackboard, green chalkboard, black paper for white ink, aged sketchbook, toned grey, toned tan, a ruled notebook page and vellum.
  • Every paper shares the same named settings (tint, tooth height, sharpness and size, fibre, weave, mottling, foxing, rules, thirst, emboss, sheen, put-on lights, chalk dust), so you tune one and swap to another without starting over. Swapping back puts back exactly what was there.
  • The blocks above feel the paper: watercolor granulation settles into the tooth, dry brush skips over it, washes run further on thirsty rice paper and keep crisp dark rims on hot press, ink lines break on rough grain and feather on soft fibres, and on blackboard and black paper the picture is drawn in light marks. On kraft and toned papers the lights are put on in white.
  • Parts of one world can sit on different papers (a village on cold press, a map room on parchment). Raking sunlight shows the tooth, parchment has its sheen, the boards are dead matte, and with every light off the frame stays black on every paper.
  • A gallery with every paper side by side under one live look, guides (choosing a paper for your art style, how paper changes watercolor and ink, an example picture-book level on paper), and a workflow that puts an existing world on paper and can be undone.
• inkBlocks: turn any 3D scene into a living ink drawing while the game runs: five swappable ink lines (technical pen, tapered brush, dip nib, loose sketchy pen, dry brush), four ink fills (tonal ink wash fading to paper in mist, pooled black, splatter and drips, dry-brush texture), seven ink colours and five whole looks.
• watercolorBlocks: make any 3D scene read as a real watercolor painting: eleven blocks (wash, bleed, glazes, pooled shadows, thin light, fade to paper, granulation, dry brush, edge darkening, backrun bloom, cold-press paper), a hero material, eleven pigment sets and eight whole looks. Pigments mix the way paint does.
• styleKit: the look stack itself, the ten slots, the shared paper and paper field, the held clock (the same boil step on every player's screen), surface-anchored marks, quality levels, masks, pigment mixing and the block registry.
• starterBlocks: simple blocks, one per slot, and their gallery.
• lookbookKit: the Lookbook, a scripted scene and camera path that measures how a look holds up in motion, with numbers; zero lookbook report prices every installed look on any machine.
• lookbookShowcaseKit: a campaign stage built from published material, character, effects and UI kits, to try looks on.

Recipe scenes

Paper Swatches (one watercolor wash with an ink line over all seventeen papers, each beside its reference picture), Ink, Line and Wash, Watercolor, Picture Book and Pixel Watercolor each load with their stack and stand beside the reference picture they were tuned against.

Use it

local StyleKit = require("~styleKit.StyleKit")
StyleKit.applyLook("watercolor")             -- a whole watercolor painting
StyleKit.swap("paper", "paperRice")          -- on thirsty rice paper, one change
StyleKit.swap("paper", "paperKraft")         -- on brown kraft, lights put on in white
StyleKit.applyLook("brushAndWash")           -- an ink wash painting
StyleKit.clear()                             -- back to the scene as rendered

Install any of the packages from ZeroMind (search "paperBlocks", "inkBlocks" or "watercolorBlocks"); each brings styleKit with it. Installs with several dependencies can take a moment (#21420). Or fork this world to start from the whole cookbook.