Interactive Expressive Illustration of 3D City Scenes

While many approaches have been developed to visualize 3D city scenes, most of them exhibit the visualization results in a uniform rendering style. This paper presents an expressive rendering approach for visualizing large-scale 3D city scenes with various rendering styles integrated in a seamless way. Each view is actually a combination of the photorealistic rendering, the nonphotorealistic rendering, and the line drawing, so as to highlight the information that is interesting for the users and de-emphasize the other that is less important. At run-time, the users are allowed to specify their interested locations with pre-determined 3D landmarks. Our system automatically computes the salience of each location and visualize the entire scene with emphasis in the area of interests. The GPU-based implementation enables real-time performance, and demonstrates outstanding practicality.