Non-Photorealistic Computer Graphics Library

Volumetric Illustration: Designing 3D Models with Internal Textures

Author(s): Shigeru Owada, Frank Nielsen, Makoto Okabe, Takeo Igarashi.
Article: ACM Transactions on Graphics, 2004.
[BibTeX]

Abstract:
This paper presents an interactive system for designing and browsing volumetric illustrations. Volumetric illustrations are 3D models with internal textures that the user can browse by cutting the models at desired location. To assign internal textures to a surface mesh, the designer cuts the mesh and provides simple guiding information to specify the correspondence between the cross-section and a reference 2D image. The guiding information is stored with the geometry and used during the synthesis of cross-sectional textures. The key idea is to synthesize a plausible cross-sectional image using 2D texture synthesis technique, instead of directly sampling from a complete 3D RGB volumetric representation. This simplifies the design interface and reduces the data size, making it possible for non-experts to rapidly design and use volumetric illustrations. We believe that our system can enrich human communications in various domains such as medicine, biology, and geology.