Motion-coherent stylization with screen-space image filters

Abstract

One of the qualities sought in expressive rendering is the 2D impression of the resulting style, called flatness. In the context of 3D scenes, screen-space stylization techniques are good candidates for flatness as they operate in the 2D image plane, after the scene has been rendered into so-called G-buffers. Various stylization filters can be applied in screen-space while making use of the geometrical information contained in G-buffers to ensure motion coherence. However, this means that filtering can only be done inside the rasterized surface of the object. This can be detrimental to some styles that require irregular silhouettes to be convincing. In this paper, we describe a post-processing pipeline that allows stylization filters to extend outside the rasterized footprint of the object by locally "inflating" the data contained in G-buffers. This pipeline is fully implemented on the GPU and can be evaluated at interactive rates. We show how common image filtering techniques, when integrated in our pipeline and in combination with G-buffer data, can be used to reproduce a wide range of "digitally-painted" appearances, such as directed brush strokes with irregular silhouettes, while keeping a degree of motion coherence.