Enhanced Cartoon and Comic Rendering

Abstract

AbstractIn this work we present an extension to common cel shading techniques, and describe four new cartoon-like ren-dering styles applicable for real-time implementations: stylistic shadows, double contour lines, soft cel shading,and pseudo edges. Our work was mainly motivated by the rich set of stylistic elements and expressional possibili-ties within the medium comic. In particular, we were inspired by Miller’s “Sin City ” and McFarlane’s “Spawn”.We designed algorithms for these styles, developed a real-time implementationand integrated it into a regular 3Dgame engine.Categories and Subject Descriptors (according to ACM CCS) : I.3.7 [Three-Dimensional Graphics and Realism]:Color, shading, shadowing, and texture1. IntroductionFor some years, the field of non-photorealistic rendering(NPR) has also focused on the representation of comic-likecomputer graphics, being limited to typical characteristicsof cel shading. The gap in the expressiveness of traditionalcomics over their adoption in computer applications still re-mains, because only little research has been done in reflect-ing, which artistic style is appropriate for a certain purpose,being with [Hal03] the only exception. Additionally, moreenhanced comic rendering techniques, such as double con-tour lines, stylistic shadows or a soft cel shading, hardly ex-ist. In this paper, we will focus on presenting our results re-garding the second aspect.1.1. Non-Photorealistic Rendering techniquesThe field of NPR aims at simulating handmade illustrationswith computer algorithms. It is mainly motivated by tradi-tional illustration techniques used in the area of medicine,archeology, and architecture. In the first instance this in-cludes feature line algorithms [ST90,Her99,BS00,IFH