Modeling 2.5D Plants from Ink Paintings

Abstract

Chinese ink painting, known as sumi-e, is a traditional art form based on careful placement of expressive brush strokes. To extend such brush strokes from their paper form, we propose a system that can digitize and transform such paintings into 2:5D sprites, while preserving the artist's unique style. We apply our paintstroke-extraction technique to plants, the most traditional subject of sumi-e, and one where CG modeling is fairly hard, but procedural or simulated animation techniques can subsequently be brought to bear. Instead of forcing artists to use pressure-sensitive digital tablets, we address the problem of how to non-invasively decompose a real painting of a plant into semantically meaningful components, like leaves and petals. Webcam filming of the artist at work provides valuable cues. This part of our system needs no human interaction and no prior training, and achieves its goal solely by analyzing the video timeline to find even intersecting brush strokes. Afterwards, it constructs a model of the plant and textures it with the extracted brush strokes, inpainting when necessary.