Geometry-based shading for shape depiction enhancement

Abstract

Recent works on Non-Photorealistic Rendering (NPR) show that object shape enhancement requires sophisticated effects such as: surface details detection and stylized shading. To date, some rendering techniques have been proposed to overcome this issue, but most of which are limited to correlate shape enhancement functionalities to surface feature variations. Therefore, this problem still persists especially in NPR. This paper is an attempt to address this problem by presenting a new approach for enhancing shape depiction of 3D objects in NPR. We first introduce a tweakable shape descriptor that offers versatile functionalities for describing the salient features of 3D objects. Then to enhance the classical shading models, we propose a new technique called Geometry-based Shading. This technique controls reflected lighting intensities based on local geometry. Our approach works without any constraint on the choice of material or illumination. We demonstrate results obtained with Blinn-Phong shading, Gooch shading, and cartoon shading. These results prove that our approach produces more satisfying results compared with the results of previous shape depiction techniques. Finally, our approach runs on modern graphics hardware in real time, which works efficiently with interactive 3D visualization.