Lit-Sphere Extension in Blender

This article shows an implementation of the Lit-Sphere extension for artistic rendering by Todo et al. inside Blender. This technique aims at letting artist freely control 3D model lighting behaviour by drawing its desired look on a proxy sphere.

Below you can see a series of examples on how this technique applies the lighting from the texture that was drawn on the proxy sphere

And here is a video about the rendering creation process, hand painting the proxy sphere at the right and tweaking some parameters of the algorithm to achieve the desired look.