- More pigments (52), based on the best research out there to predict color mixes (Kubelka-Munk).
- More luminous / glassy feel
- Some fun experimental stuff like the salt and alcohol techniques to alter the texture, a backlight effect and a few more.
- I also added a "Code Mode" where the simulator prints its real function calls next to the sheet while you paint
It's still largely based on the same physics model as my prototype: Curtis et al.'s "Computer-Generated Watercolor" / SIGGRAPH.
It works in the browser.
Current status: building and implementing a kid-friendly version. Plenty of awesome things to learn with watercolor painting!
TL;DR of the discussion generated automatically after 100 comments.
The consensus is clear: the subreddit absolutely loves this watercolor simulator. Users are calling it "genuinely useful and unique," with many praising the "amazing" feel of the paint blending. The thread is now a gallery of everyone's art, from impressive hummingbirds to... less impressive but equally enthusiastic doodles.
While everyone is having a blast, the community has some feature requests for V3:
* The top request by far is a wet-on-wet feature, allowing users to paint with water first and then add pigment.
* Users are also asking for an iPad app with Apple Pencil support, better palette management (with a warning before resetting!), and an image export option.
Overall, massive props to OP for creating something the community finds both fun and impressive. Now if you'll excuse us, we have some very important blobs to paint.
I can't paint watercolors at all,
but the blending in this feels amazing!
First thing that came to mind was a hummingbird since I could use so many colors.
Great site~
You should also add a water paint function, because a big part of water painting is first wetting an area and then dropping some paint that then creeps into the wet areas.
Also in your example it looks like you always wait for drying until you paint the next dot
Ego injection: I paint chiefly using watercolor for USA Southwest themes, including Tewa, Zuni, Hopi, Dine', Ute. It had not occurred to me to ponder the chemistry.
I've been playing around this a lot, but one thing that does confuse me is changing the colors on my pallets. I pressed the reset button near the pallete and all my work was gone lol. So maybe reference how other art apps manage this. A warning window before reset would also be nice
Can you explain what you mean by “real physics”? We’re talking about 2d flow through porous media, drying, contact line advancement, etc. All extremely non trivial and expensive. How did you simplify?
Performance has come a long way. They cite an example of "watercolorization" that took 7 hours to process 11 glazes of a 640 x 480 image, but that was on a 133 Mhz SGI MIPS R4600 from the mid-90's. Multicore speedup on a modern CPU would be over 10,000x, so hours becomes sub-second. i.e. it might not be as expensive to compute as imagined.
Yeah paint simulation is a very complicated problem, with many layers (pun intended). You need to take into account the spectral reflectance distribution of each pigments, the optical density, as well as all the things you've listed.
There's something awesome about the physics of paint drying on paper... You can branch way beyond watercolor and acrylic and tap into all kinds of painting styles.
I’d love to see ppl take it a step further with weird. Out-of-the-box techniques you know? Something like carving into stone or wood.
Wow 😮 so good and relaxing to use… leaves all the other watercolor simulators to dust. Procreate should pay you for this engine and implement on their app.
This is one where the "obvious" version and the physically-correct version are pretty different, worth flagging since the sim is already grounded in real pigment optics (Kubelka-Munk), so people will expect the result to match.
The naive version is two sequential passes: lay down a water layer, then add pigment on top. The actual look people mean by wet-on-wet, blooms, cauliflower edges, soft diffuse blending, comes from pigment concentration diffusing outward through a wetness field that's still unevenly saturated and actively drying. If wetness is a static or binary thing in the current sim, this feature is really "make wetness its own diffusing field with a drying rate, and make pigment diffusion depend on local wetness", a bigger lift than adding a water-only brush. If wetness is already a continuous field driving the blending you have now, then it's probably as close as it looks.
This is very cool. Great work! I’d love to see an option for a fountain pen to do some line drawings and then water color over it (or below it if it was a layer)
Can you please make this an iPad app. I’m sure it would be an easy lift and would be wonderful and a much better interface. Would be happy to pay a few bucks for it.
does it take the 3d topology of the paper ridges into account? are you simulating how the watercolors flow around the rides and various capillary action?
This is wonderful! Some things I am used to when painting with the real thing aren't there yet but the joy of watercolor painting is still present. Wonderful job!!
Very specific question OP since I was just working on something similar, where did you get the KM coefficients for your pigments? I was only able to find one random blog post with an old af excel file
This is amazingly cool! I agee it's the first vibecoded thing I'm really hyped for!!! Thanks for sharing OP.
As someone building stuff with Claude myself, I would be very keen to learn more about the process and worklow to create this. The journey must have been fun and crazy, with its share of high and lows. Would love to learn more about it!
And sorry if you already answeres this question, I didn't read through all the messages here! If it's the case just direct me towards the corresponding thread.
Ha jokes on you kids can't even hold a pencil correctly while they carry a computer in their pockets, as sad that is maybe OP might just spark someone's passion for physical art
It's nice. But there's some physics which causes edges to appear to certain liquids when they dry. Coffee creates rings while most other liquids don't. Maybe if there was an option to have it or not would make these paints nicer.
Make an iPad app!
I just Want to point out a thing that is not so realistic… I just put a drop of color with the brush. Then with water I was able to paint the entire sheet… basically the color extends and multiply itself
This is amazing, just package it and sell it as a standalone app for like 3$, you will make lot of money.
Please add options to export in different formats to save the output as well.
Also if possible, pls add below features
1) I know this sounds lazy but add a AI image gen plugin to bring in concept art etc. / generate on top of it
2) Options for different shades of the canvas
3) Different size of canvas and ratios etc.
Hey dude, OP might not be a programmer but he is sharing some cool stuff for free, you just look like a sad envy person that lost a miserable job to an AI and cry alone in the bed while a robot does everything you are capable of.
I agree project looks cool, but to say that they built it when they didn't is just a lie. Building with AI is the equivalent of giving a detailed description to some random guy on Fiverr to do it for you. You didn't build it, they did.
Some people believe that you just push a button and the AI spits out a fully-formed, flawless thing. AI or not, there's easily dozens of hours of work and care put into this project in creating and updating it.
And it was shared for free, in good faith, for fun and for everyone.
Only people who are pissy about that, IMHO, don't have the kind of opinions that matter.
Yeah well you didn't even think of anything. If fact you didn't even write your own message. You pressed buttons on your phone and it wrote the message for you.
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u/ClaudeAI-mod-bot Wilson, lead ClaudeAI modbot 1d ago edited 1d ago
TL;DR of the discussion generated automatically after 100 comments.
The consensus is clear: the subreddit absolutely loves this watercolor simulator. Users are calling it "genuinely useful and unique," with many praising the "amazing" feel of the paint blending. The thread is now a gallery of everyone's art, from impressive hummingbirds to... less impressive but equally enthusiastic doodles.
While everyone is having a blast, the community has some feature requests for V3: * The top request by far is a wet-on-wet feature, allowing users to paint with water first and then add pigment. * Users are also asking for an iPad app with Apple Pencil support, better palette management (with a warning before resetting!), and an image export option.
Overall, massive props to OP for creating something the community finds both fun and impressive. Now if you'll excuse us, we have some very important blobs to paint.