Detail Control in Line Drawings of 3D Meshes

by Kyuman Jeong, Alex Ni, Seungyong Lee and Lee Markosian
 
in The Visual Computer, September 2005:
Special issue containing the proceedings of Pacific Graphics 2005

Left: A high-resolution 3D mesh rendered as a line drawing without detail control.
Middle: The same model rendered with detail control enabled.
Right: Detail is automatically increased when the camera zooms in.

Abstract

We address the problem of rendering a 3D mesh in the style of a line drawing, in which little or no shading is used and instead shape cues are provided by silhouettes and suggestive contours. Our specific goal is to depict shape features at a desired scale. For example, when mesh triangles project into the image plane at sub-pixel sizes, both suggestive contours and silhouettes may form dense networks that convey shape poorly. The solution we propose is to convert the input mesh to a multi-resolution representation (specifically, a progressive mesh), then view-dependently refine or coarsen the mesh to control the size of its triangles in image space. We thereby control the scale of shape features that are depicted via silhouettes and suggestive contours. We propose a novel refinement criterion that achieves this goal, and we address the problem of maintaining temporal coherence of silhouette and suggestive contours when extracting them from a changing mesh.

Last modified November 22, 2005