“Real-time nonphotorealistic rendering” by Markosian, Kowalski, Goldstein, Trychin, Hughes, et al. …

Nonphotorealistic rendering (NPR) can help make comprehensible but simple pictures of complicated objects by employing an economy of line. But current nonphotorealistic rendering is primarily a batch process. This paper presents a real-time nonphotorealistic renderer that deliberately trades accuracy and detail for speed. Our renderer uses a method for determining visible lines and surfaces which is a modification of Appel’s hidden-line algorithm, with improvements which are based on the topology of singular maps of a surface into the plane. The method we describe for determining visibility has the potential to be used in any NPR system that requires a description of visible lines or surfaces in the scene. The major contribution of this paper is thus to describe a tool which can significantly improve the performance of these systems. We demonstrate the system with several nonphotorealistic rendering styles, all of which operate on complex models at interactive frame rates.

1. A. Appel. The notion of quantitative invisibility and the machine rendering of solids. In Proceedings of ACM National Conference, pp. 387-393,1967.
2. J. Blinn. Jim Blinn’s Corner, chapter 10, pp. 91-102. Morgan Kaufmann, 1996.
3. D. Dooley and M. Cohen. Automatic illustration of 3d geometric models: Lines. In Proceedings of the 1990 Symposium on Interactive 3D Graphics, pp. 77-82, March 1990.
4. G. Elber and E. Cohen. Hidden curve removal for free form surfaces. In Proceedings of SIGGRAPH ’90, pp. 95-104, August 1990.
5. J. Foley, A. van Dam, S. Feiner, and J. E Hughes. Computer Graphics: Principles and Practice, chapter 15, pp. 666-667. Addison-Wesley, 1992.
6. R. Galimberti and U. Montanari. An algorithm for hidden line elimination. Communications of the ACM, 12(4):206-211,April 1969.
7. E Haeberli. Paint by numbers: Abstract image representations. In Proceedings of SIGGRAPH ’90, pp. 207-214, August 1990.
8. H. Hoppe, T. DeRose, T. Duchamp, M. Halstead, H. Jin, J. McDonald, J. Schweitzer, and W. Stuetzle. Piecewise smooth surface reconstruction. Proceedings of SIGGRAPH ’94, pp. 295-302, July 1994.
9. C. Hornung. A method for solving the visibility problem. IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, pp. 26-33, 1984.
10. J. Lansdown and S. Schofield. Expressive rendering: A review of nonphotorealistic techniques. IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, 15(3):29-37, May 1995.
11. W. Leister. Computer generated copper plates. Computer Graphics Forum, 13(1 ):69-77, 1994.
12. E Loutrel. A solution to the hidden-line problem for computerdrawn polyhedra. IEEE Transactions on Computers, C-19(3):205- 213, March 1970.
13. B. Meier. Painterly rendering for animation. In Proceedings of SIG- GRAPH ’96, pp. 477-484, August 1996.
14. K. Perlin. An image synthesizer. In Proceedings of SIGGRAPH ’85, pp. 287-296, July 1985.
15. E E Preparata and M. I. Shamos. Computational Geometry: An Introduction, chapter 7. Springer-Verlag, 1985.
16. T. Saito and T. Takahashi. Comprehensible rendering of 3d shapes. In Proceedings of SIGGRAPH ’90, pp. 197-206, aug 1990.
17. T. Strothotte, B. Preim, A. Raab, J. Schuman, and D. Forsey. How to render frames and influence people. Computer Graphics Forum, 13(3):455-466, September 1994.
18. I. Sutherland, R. Sproull, and R. Schumacker. A characterization of ten hidden-surface algorithms. Computing Surveys, 6(1): 1-55, March 1974.
19. L. R. Williams. Topological reconstruction of a smooth manifoldsolid from its occluding contour. Technical Report 94-04, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA, 1994.
20. G. Winkenbach and D. Salesin. Computer-generated pen-and-ink illustration. In Proceedings of SIGGRAPH ’94, pp. 91-100, July 1994.
21. G. Winkenbach and D. Salesin. Rendering parametric surfaces in pen and ink. In Proceedings of SIGGRAPH ’96, pp. 469-476, August 1996.
22. R. Zeleznik, K. Herndon, and J. E Hughes. Sketch: An interface for sketching 3d scenes. In Proceedings of SIGGRAPH ’96, pp. 163-170, August 1996.