A Computational Method for Interactive Design of Marbling Patterns

Paper marbling is a painting process where the artist makes use of special tools to carefully interact with paints deposited on an aqueous surface to produce marblelike paintings transferred to an absorbent paper. In this work, we present an interactive and intuitive application that simulates the marbling process digitally in real-time. To this end, we first map the artist tools into a simple and intuitive user interface. Secondly, we employ a Navier-Stokes equations solver on the GPU with a multi-layer approach to handling multiple colored paints with support to lighting and paints undulations. Our system accomplishes interactive frame-rates while manipulating tens of distinct colored paints, a requisite to applications like digital games. Results show the effectiveness of our real-time digital marbling system, providing to the artists an intuitive work interface.