Generative art over the years | Hacker News

The author has a small library of simulated materials, including watercolor washes, dry brush strokes, felt-tip pens, cracked glaze, and pencil fills.

These materials are not physically accurate.

The author has been working on a black-and-white film app and started by reading academic papers on silver halide emulsions reacting to light.

For 50–100MP photos, those physical models could take several minutes to preview or export, and they did not look close to actual film.

A real-time computer graphics approach that focused on appearance and feel worked better, and the author also read an interview with spktra/Josh Fagin about light scattering through animation cels.