Contour-driven brush stroke synthesis

We propose in this paper an interactive sketch-based system for simulating oriental brush strokes on complex shapes. We introduce a contour-driven approach where the user inputs contours to represent complex shapes, the system estimates automatically the optimal trajectory of the brush, and then renders them into oriental ink painting. Unlike previous work where the brush trajectory is explicitly specified as input, we automatically estimate this trajectory given the outline of the shape to paint. Existing methods can be classified into: (1) methods that explicitly model a virtual 3D brush and mimic its effect on a paper [Wang and Wang 2007], and (2) methods that simulate the rendering effect on a 2D canvas without an explicit 3D brush model [Okabe et al. 2007]. Our approach falls into the second category. Figure 1 shows four results generated by our algorithm.