Real-Time Artistic Silhouettes Rendering for 3D Models

In line drawings, the line thickness is an important element for artists to depict shape and express emotion. In this paper, we proposed an approach for the real-time rendering of artistic silhouette outlines, based on the inherent aesthetic law of line thickness. We adopted the triangle shell technique as the basis of our silhouette outlines rendering method. By shifting the vertex of the back-facing mesh along its vertex normal under the aesthetic law, we recovered the variation of line thickness that artists often use when creating line drawings, and obtained aesthetically pleasing rendering results. Our method is implemented on GPU, and is suitable for real-time applications such as 3D games.