A Hardware Accelerated Chinese Landscape Painting Rendering

Non-Photorealistic Rendering (NPR) injects aesthetic and stylized elements into computer graphics. NPR primarily aims to conveying not only compressed information but also a certain artistic spirit, by simulating various artistic styles such as pencil sketching, watercolor painting, or Chinese ink painting. Most of existing systems emulating Chinese painting effects rely mainly on software implementation run on CPU, and it is very difficult to achieve real-time rendering, especially for complex scenes.In this paper we present a hardware accelerated Chinese landscape painting rendering system, which accomplishes real-time rendering of hills, trees, cloud sea and waterfall that commonly appear in Chinese Painting. The system consists of five modules, namely, the multi-pass rendering of hill based on a novel Chinese painting illumination model, billboard based tree shading, displacement mapping based cloud animation, texture mapping based waterfall simulation and on-line video capture. By exploiting the flexibility and streaming mode of programmable graphics hardware, our system can be configured to simulate the effect of Chinese landscape painting for arbitrary three-dimensional scene and provides on-the-fly walkthrough as well as off-line editing. The proposed system can be easily extended to diverse applications ranging from computer animation, computer game and multimedia entertainment industries.