Highly Stylised Drawn Animation

Abstract

Abstract. In this paper we argue for our NPAR system as an effective 2D alternative to most of NPR research that is focused on frame coherent stylised rendering of 3D models. Our approach gives a highly stylised look to images without the support of 3D models, and yet they still behave as though animated by drawing, which they are. First, a stylised brush tool is used to freely draw extreme poses of characters. Each character is built up of 2D drawn brush strokes which are manually grouped into layers. Each layer is assigned its place in a drawing hierarchy -Hierarchical Display Model (HDM). Next, multiple HDMs are created for the same character, each corresponding to a specific view. A collection of HDMs essentially reintroduces some correspondence information to the 2D drawings needed for in-betweening and, in effect, eliminates the need for a true 3D model. Once the models are composed, the animation phase can start. The animator first defines keyframes by specifying extreme poses in time. Next, brush stroke trajectories defined by the HDMs of the keyframes are inbetweened automatically across intermediary frames. Finally, each HDM of each generated in-between frame is traversed and all elements are drawn one on another from back to front. Regarding stylisation, we focus on techniques that realise highly rendered styles which are particularly difficult to animate by traditional means including the 'airbrushed', scraperboard, watercolour, Gouache, 'ink-wash', and the 'crayon' style. We believe our system offers a new fresh perspective on computer aided animation production and associated tools.

Stroke Correspondence Construction Using Manifold Learning

“…As this constraint is too restrictive for real world production, this method is only applicable to simple cut-out like animation. The same problem also exists in [DF06]. Similar approaches to 2D blending, including [CTS*06] and [YF09,BBA09], are good for interpolation but not for correspondence construction.…”

Smart Camera System-on-Chip Architecture for Real-Time Brush Based Interactive Painting Systems

“…When individual strokes are recorded and represented as parametric curves, they can be manipulated afterwards by the user, to adapt the shape and size. An even further step is the composition of artwork for use in the generation of moving images and cartoons [18,19].…”