Non-photorealistic Animation Research Articles

Real-time non-photorealistic animation for immersive storytelling in “Age of Sail”

Immersive media such as virtual and augmented reality pose some interesting new challenges for non-photorealistic animation: we must not only balance the screen-space rules of a 2D visual style against 3D motion coherence, but also account for stereo spatialization and interactive camera movement, at a rate of 90 frames per second. We introduce two new real-time rendering techniques: MetaTexture, an example-based texturing method that adheres to the movement of 3D geometry while preserving the texture’s screen-space characteristics, and Edge Breakup, a method for roughening edges by warping with structured noise. We also describe a custom rendering pipeline featuring art-directable coloring, shadow filtering, and texture indication, and our approach to animating and rendering a painterly ocean in real time. We show how we have used these techniques to achieve the “moving illustration” style of the real-time immersive short film “Age of Sail”.

Real-time non-photorealistic animation for immersive storytelling in “Age of Sail”

Immersive media such as virtual and augmented reality pose some interesting new challenges for non-photorealistic animation: we must not only balance the screen-space rules of a 2D visual style against 3D motion coherence, but also account for stereo spatialization and interactive camera movement, at a rate of 90 frames per second. We introduce two new real-time rendering techniques: MetaTexture, an example-based texturing method that adheres to the movement of 3D geometry while preserving the texture’s screen-space characteristics, and Edge Breakup, a method for roughening edges by warping with structured noise. We also describe a custom rendering pipeline featuring art-directable coloring, shadow filtering, and texture indication, and our approach to animating and rendering a painterly ocean in real time. We show how we have used these techniques to achieve the “moving illustration” style of the real-time immersive short film “Age of Sail”.

Pencil drawing animation from a video

ABSTRACTWe present an automatic, efficient, and simple technique to create pencil drawing animation, starting from a video. We generate pencil drawing from a source frame based on stroke modeling, specifying the properties of strokes, in combination with layered lines, flow‐guided difference‐of‐Gaussian (DoG) filter to several layers. Generated pencil strokes are translated and rotated because of forces exerted from the sequential frames using rigid body dynamics. Linear and angular forces acting on strokes are calculated according to the temporally filtered per‐pixel optical flow vectors. Our framework effectively generates the coherent animation of pencil strokes preserving the structured appearance of charcoal or pastel, which is difficult to achieve with previous‐abstraction based non‐photorealistic animation. Moreover, our stroke simulation step is suitable for animating the different styles of strokes, such as oil painting and watercolor, and can be efficiently implemented to produce animation in relatively inexpensive manner. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Stroke Surfaces: Temporally Coherent Artistic Animations from Video

The contribution of this paper is a novel framework for synthesizing nonphotorealistic animations from real video sequences. We demonstrate that, through automated mid-level analysis of the video sequence as a spatiotemporal volume--a block of frames with time as the third dimension--we are able to generate animations in a wide variety of artistic styles, exhibiting a uniquely high degree of temporal coherence. In addition to rotoscoping, matting, and novel temporal effects unique to our method, we demonstrate the extension of static nonphotorealistic rendering (NPR) styles to video, including painterly, sketchy, and cartoon shading. We demonstrate how this novel coherent shading framework may be combined with our earlier motion emphasis work to produce a comprehensive "Video Paintbox" capable of rendering complete cartoon-styled animations from video clips.

"Tour into the picture" as a non-photorealistic animation

"Tour into the picture" as a non-photorealistic animation