Suggestive Contours & Highlight Lines for Conveying Shape

Project Description

I want to create a non-photorealistic rendering system to convey shape using suggestive contours and highlights. Suggestive contours are lines that will most likely be contours if viewed at a different angle.

I use a library called trimesh2 which handled calculating the curvature of my obj meshes. To calculate suggestive contours: One algorithm uses the zero crossing of the radial curvature. The second algorithm defines the suggestive contour to be the set of minima of n · v in the direction of w where n is the normal, v is the view vector, and w is the view vector projected onto the tangent plane. I found a similar Final Project from the University of Utah (Dan Maljovec) which compliment/ filled in the gaps for the math found in the papers.

Given a mesh as input, my program will be able render the shape in a minimal way using contours, suggestive contours, highlights, as well as drawing the curvature. My program allows for toggling the options between on/off.

The input meshes I will work with will be obj files. I use open sourced and freely available meshes such as the Stanford Bunny and a person obj.

A user will interact with my program by specifying a mesh file on the command line (up to 2 obj meshes, just to demo that it works on multiple meshes at the same time).