Future Work and Conclusion

 We have reported on an approach that produces interactive technical illustrations. This work incorporates established principles from traditional art in a framework of powerful geometric modeling and rendering. Although this work is based on empirical knowledge of human perception, a number of parameter settings are available to the user based on their aesthetic preferences. Our approach incorporates: parameters for cool and warm color choices, new interactive silhouette algorithms, various shadow schemes, line choices for internal features versus external outlines, and rendering methods exploiting texture maps. Together these produce technically informative and aesthetically pleasing interactive illustrations.

This paper addresses a widely occurring need, namely, generating attractive and informative technical illustrations for modern documentation schemes, which are likely to be hierarchical and web-based for individual exploration. It represents an advance in the relatively under-developed area of computer graphics involving non-photorealistic rendering, where the needs are extensive and the available methods are few. Inspired by the work of Markosian et al.'s real-time probabilistic silhouette finding methods, we have taken the next step to create a system which incorporates fast deterministic silhouette and crease finding algorithms, with artistic shading and shadowing.

These interactive illustrations emphasize the structure and detail of mechanical models. We believe that in the future, this approach can also be tuned for many other important domains such as medical illustration. We would also like to further explore changing line width along a single silhouette, calculating soft shadows from silhouettes, as well as creating new algorithms aimed at controlling silhouette frame-to-frame coherence.