Hardware Support for Non-photorealistic Rendering

Ramesh Raskar
Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs, Cambridge, MA

Siggraph Graphics Hardware, 2001
August, 2001, Los Angeles, CA, USA  

Special features such as ridges, valleys and silhouettes, of a polygonal scene are usually displayed by explicitly identifying and then rendering edges for the corresponding geometry. The candidate edges are identified using the connectivity information, which requires preprocessing of the data. We present a non-obvious but surprisingly simple to implement technique to render such features without connectivity information or preprocessing. At the hardware level, based only on the vertices of a given flat polygon, we introduce new polygons, with appropriate color, shape and orientation, so that they eventually appear as special features.