Introducing Dynamic Paint in Blender 3d

The new Blender release has brought a lot of awaited features and created a real buzz in the community. Dynamic paint is the new feature introduced which has made it possible to “draw on anything with anything”.

In the 3d space, anything, including a plane, a face, a machine can be the canvas and anything, including a hand, a bullet, a flying UFO can be a brush. Move the brush on the canvas, and you could draw with the brush’s material or any other material!! Which means that a red sphere could be moving on the sky, leaving interesting patterns drawn in interesting colors, textures - even lightening the sky while it moves. Yeah, you read it correctly, brush can be a light too, and wherever it would touch the canvas, it would leave its mark - lighting. (Check out the video embedded below.)

Apart from painting, Dynamic Paint includes many other tools too, like displacement and waves and they are all pretty exciting. Displacement mode can be used for a variety of purposes - say you want to make a video where a moving object is creating patterns in sand by displacing it, or an animal is leaving foot prints on muddy surface - Dynamic Paint can achieve this all very easily. Waves mode, on the other hand, would create wave like patterns as if the canvas is some liquid body. A falling object will create splashes, a moving one will create continuous waves and so on.

Dynamic Paint has huge potential - the possibilities it has brought under the eager hands of Blender artists are amazing. Some great test videos are already uploaded by users on youtube, although the feature is relatively new. But that is the thing about open source software, the official release has been recently made but people in the community had already started playing with the tool with the intermediate builds and test releases available on GraphicAll.org. I did some initial basic testing myself, and embedded video (above) shows the result. Check it out, Dynamic Paint is really Dyno-Cool.