Interactive Generation of (Paleontological) Scientific Illustrations from 3D-models

Abstract

Scientific illustrations play an important role in the paleontological domain and are complex illustrations that are manually drawn. The artist creates illustrations that feature common expressive painting techniques: outlines, both irregular and periodic stippling as well as an abstract shaded surface in the background. We present a semiautomatic tool to generate these illustrations from 3D-models in real-time. It is based on an extensible GPU-based pipeline to interactively render characteristic into image-layers that are combined in an image-editing fashion. The user can choose the techniques used to render each layer and manipulate its key aspects. Using 3D- and 2D-painting the artist can still interact with the result and adjust it to his or her liking.