Non-photorealistic animation for immersive storytelling

Abstract

Immersive media such as virtual and augmented reality pose some interesting new challenges for non-photorealistic animation: we must not only balance the screen-space rules of a 2D visual style against 3D motion coherence, but also account for stereo spatialization and interactive camera movement, at a rate of 90 frames per second. We introduce two new real-time rendering techniques: MetaTexture, an example-based multiresolution texturing method that adheres to the movement of 3D geometry while maintaining a consistent level of screen-space detail, and Edge Breakup, a method for roughening edges by warping with structured noise. We show how we have used these techniques, along with art-directable coloring, shadow filtering, and shader-based texture indication, to achieve the "moving illustration" style of the immersive short film "Age of Sail".