I have a dream - it involves giving objects in Unity the appearance of having been painted with watercolours. For the most part the solution is simple - I can use a printed UV map as a template, literally paint the texture with watercolours, then scan the painting and apply it to the model.
The problem is really with the edges of the models themselves - hard polygonal edges are NOT going to help create the illusion that our game is actually a painting. What can I do to make the edges blend with whatever is behind the model in a painterly way? Is there a shader for it? Alternatively, is there something I can do to simply blur the edges?
Most of painterly / “non photorealistic” rendering approaches go in two directions:
Post process the rendering. All rendering is still polygonal, but perhaps it also renders depth normals of the scene. Then there’s a post-processing effect that distorts the edges and so on.
Replace conventional polygons with something different. For example, replace all edges with quads that have thickness, use textures on them, orient them so they face the camera etc.
I wondered the same thing, although it wasn’t exactly watercolour I was aiming for, I thought the solution might be the same - adding billboard type quads on the edges of objects.
Unfortunately, I’ve got no idea how to achieve this!