Non-photorealistic virtual sculpting on graphics hardware

In this paper we describe a real-time system for the virtual sculpting application in a non-photorealistic style. To date, most researchers pursuing virtual sculpture have focused on the physical fidelity of simulation, with methods for achieving photorealism being key technical contributions. Our goal is to leverage the advantages of non-photorealistic rendering in terms of aesthetics, expression and computational cost. The haptic interaction is developed to shape the deformable surfaces through touch-enabled manipulation. Edge extraction is used to highlight boundaries which are critical for human perception, and then non-linear diffusion is employed to reduce immaterial details. A novel inverse Gaussian bilateral filter is adopted for spot removal. The non-photorealistic rendering is processed in a spatiotemporal manner to maintain temporal coherence. In addition, parallel implementation on graphics hardware (GPU) ensures real-time performance.