Art-based Modeling and Rendering

The proposed new look
for 3D graphics.

Project Overview

The development of art-based methods for depicting virtual scenes has the potential to bring a wide range of new looks to computer graphics, and also to reduce the cost of modeling complex scenes. If the rendering style evokes the complexity of the scene indirectly, the underlying scene geometry might be relatively simple. One example of a system taking such an approach is described in the Siggraph 99 paper, "Art-based Rendering of Fur, Grass and Trees" (see below).

The main goal of this project is to provide new algorithms and tools with which an artist can apply her skills to define both shapes and the rendering styles used to depict them. As in the children's story, Harold and the Purple Crayon, a user of the system might start out in an empty virtual world and then fill it with complex shapes by drawing them as she moves through the resulting environment.

With that in mind, we seek to build a system in which the user models complex surfaces by first constructing simplified representations of the underlying masses that give them their form. She then "oversketches" the masses with a smooth surface that approximates their collective shape. Two recent papers, "An Interface for Sketching 3D Curves," and "Skin: A Constructive Approach to Modeling Free-form Shapes," address particular sub-problems that arise in carrying out this approach.

The next step will be to generalize the curve-sketching technique and apply it toward an interface for sketching a new class of "soft" primitives. These can be an end in themselves or can serve as "skeletons" over which the user sketches a "skin." We continue to develop new rendering algorithms targeting a wider range of stylized effects, together with user interfaces for customizing these styles and selectively applying them to surface regions.

Researchers

Publications

• Robert D. Kalnins, Lee Markosian, Barbara J. Meier, Michael A. Kowalski, Joseph C. Lee, Philip L. Davidson, Matthew Webb, John F. Hughes and Adam Finkelstein.
  WYSIWYG NPR: Drawing Strokes Directly on 3D Models.
  Proceedings of Siggraph 2002.
• Jonathan M. Cohen.
  Systems for Sketching in 3D
  Senior thesis, Brown University, May 2000.
• Lee Markosian, Barbara J. Meier, Michael A. Kowalski,
  Loring S. Holden, J. D. Northrup and John F. Hughes.
  Art-based Rendering with Continuous Levels of Detail.
  Proceedings of NPAR 2000
• J. D. Northrup and Lee Markosian.
  Artistic Silhouettes: A Hybrid Approach.
  Proceedings of NPAR 2000.
• Jonathan M. Cohen, John F. Hughes and Robert C. Zeleznik.
  Harold: A World Made of Drawings.
  Proceedings of NPAR 2000.
• Michael A. Kowalski, Lee Markosian, J.D. Northrup, Lubomir Bourdev,
  Ronen Barzel, Loring S. Holden and John F. Hughes.
  Art-Based Rendering of Fur, Grass, and Trees.
  Proceedings of Siggraph 99.
  Quicktime from SIGGRAPH 99 CD-ROM Proceedings (17.9 MB)
• Lee Markosian, Jonathan M. Cohen, Thomas Crulli and John F. Hughes.
  Skin: A Constructive Approach to Modeling Free-form Shapes.
  Proceedings of Siggraph 99.
• Jonathan M. Cohen, Lee Markosian, Robert C. Zeleznik, and John F. Hughes.
  An Interface for Sketching 3D Curves.
  Proceedings of the 1999 ACM Symposium on Interactive 3D Graphics, pp. 17-21.
• Lee Markosian, Michael A. Kowalski, Samuel J. Trychin, Lubomir D. Bourdev, Daniel Goldstein and John F. Hughes.
  Real-Time Nonphotorealistic Rendering.
  Proceedings of SIGGRAPH '97.
  Quicktime from SIGGRAPH 97 CD-ROM Proceedings (13.3 MB)
• Lubomir Bourdev.
  Rendering Nonphotorealistic Strokes with Temporal and Arc-length Coherence.
  Master's thesis, Brown University, May 1998.

Bibtex entries for these papers

Contact:  Lee Markosian