Non-Photorealistic Computer Graphics Library

Blueprints: illustrating architecture and technical parts using hardware-accelerated non-photorealistic rendering

Author(s): Marc Nienhaus, Jürgen Döllner.
Proceedings: Graphics Interface (GI'04), pp. 49--56, Canadian Human-Computer Communications Society, 2004.
[BibTeX]

Abstract:
Outlining and enhancing visible and occluded features in drafts of architecture and technical parts are essential techniques to visualize complex aggregated objects and to illustrate position, layout, and relations of their components.In this paper, we present blueprints, a novel non-photorealistic hardware-accelerated rendering technique that outlines visible and non-visible perceptually important edges of 3D objects. Our technique is based on the edge map algorithm and the depth peeling technique to extract these edges from arbitrary 3D scene geometry in depth-sorted order. After edge maps have been generated, they are composed in image space using depth sprites, which allow us to combine blueprints with further 3D scene contents. We introduce depth masking to dynamically adapt the number of rendering passes for highlighting and illustrating features of particular importance and their relation to the entire assembly. Finally, we give an example of blueprints that visualize and illustrate ancient architecture in the scope of cultural heritage.