Research

My research is focused on creating computer graphics techniques for producing imagery that increases effective visual communication through use of aesthetic and artistic methods.  These techniques will build on approaches used by artists working with traditional media.  I am interested in artistic rendering (sometimes called non-photorealistic rendering) as both an interactive process for drawing textures  and as a rendering process for 2d and 3d animation.  In the past, I researched methods and built tools that allow users to quickly experiment with color palettes within the context of composing imagery.

Projects and Papers

Painterly Rendering for Animation

Painterly Rendering Haystack

The painterly renderer was developed for an earlier version of the Beethoven’s Fifth piece in Fantasia 2000. It renders 3d geometry with screen-space paintbrush images. The color, orientation, and size of strokes is determined by reference images.

 

Wysiwyg NPR

This system lets a designer directly draw on a 3D model with strokes, imparting a personal aesthetic to the object. The artist chooses a brush style, then draws strokes over the model
from one or more viewpoints. When the system renders the scene from any new viewpoint, it adapts the number and placement of the strokes appropriately to maintain the original look.

 

Graftals

Graftals, or graphic texture elements, are a way to create the look of complex textures such as grass or fur in interactive stroke-based illustrations without representing them explicitly. This work extends earlier graftal work to allow graftals to be specified directly by designers and to manage multiresolution behavior as different levels of detail, also specified by designers.

 

Interactive Palette Tools

This paper is a result of the Accessible Color Project.  We integrated core concepts from art, perceptual science, and psychology to develop a new toolset, Interactive Palette Tools, implemented as a prototype plug-in to Adobe Illustrator.  With these tools, users can quickly experiment with color within the context of their compositions to arrive at deliberate, confident color selections.