Real-time Simulation of Thin Paint Media
Author(s): Tom Van Laerhoven, Frank Van Reeth.
Proceedings: SIGGRAPH2005 sketch, Los Angeles, July 31-Aug 2,
2005.
[BibTeX] 
Abstract:
The possibility of experimenting with various techniques and paint
media, as well as the ability of introducing a wide range of digital
tools, makes a digital equivalent of the traditional painting process
a valuable asset for both novices and experienced artists. Existing
work on applications for thin watery paint is mainly focused on
automatic generation of painterly-style images from input images,
ignoring the fact that painting is a process that intuitively should
be interactive. Efforts to create real-time interactive systems are
limited to a single paint medium and results often suffer from a
trade-off between real-timeness and simulation complexity.
We present an application for real-time interactive creation of images
with thin watery paint, including watercolor, gouache and Chinese
ink. Our canvas model adopts stable fluid dynamics algorithms
to transfer pigment densities and water quantities on top of the canvas.
Heuristic rules handle the deposition of pigment within the
irregularities of the canvas surface, as well as the evaporation, absorption
and capillary diffusion of water inside the canvas structure.
We extend our previous work on a parallel implementation
[Van Laerhoven et al. 2004] with a new approach suitable for graphics
hardware, the Kubelka-Munk diffuse reflectance model and the
capability to produce paintings with paint media related to watercolor,
like gouache and Chinese ink. The application can also generate
animated paintings from stroke curve data.