PhD ceremony Mr. M.A.C. Gerl: Explorations in interactive illustrative rendering

PhD ceremony: Mr. M.A.C. Gerl, 11.00 uur, Academiegebouw, Broerstraat 5, Groningen

Dissertation: Explorations in interactive illustrative rendering

Promotor(s): prof. J.B.T.M. Roerdink

Faculty: Mathematics and Natural Sciences

We present research in interactive illustrative rendering that aims at improving the aesthetic quality of the generated images and the user interaction.

We discuss two projects that explore different strategies of achieving these goals. The first project deals with the generation of illustrations directly from volume data (e.g., CT scanner data). We present a visualization framework that combines rule-based visualization with a graphical user interface to provide users with a flexible, direct, and graphical way of interacting with the result. We allow users to apply rendering styles via brushing on data properties. The second project deals with the generation of hatching illustrations from polygonal 3D models, simulating the style of classical pen-and-ink hatching illustrations. We aim to overcome the regular and synthetic appearance of the results of existing methods by incorporating human virtuosity in the image synthesis.

We present a hatching method that combines automatic example-based control with interactive user control over the result. This strategy allows us to improve the aesthetic quality of the generated illustrations, because it facilitates a twofold (automatic and interactive) influence of human virtuosity on the result. We use image processing and machine learning to learn the drawing style present in hand-drawn example illustrations. We then apply this learned drawing style to semi-automatically synthesize similar hatching illustrations from 3D models. Our proposed user interactions make computer-generated hatching accessible to people without expertise in computer graphics and illustration.