We present a non-photo realistic, real-time painterly rendering technique for terrains. The painterly appearance and the impression of terrains is created by effectively rendering several brush strokes. The strokes have fixed locations on the surfaces of the terrain during animation to enable frame to frame coherency. The strokes are rendered as alpha blended sprites in two-dimensions and are oriented along the slope of terrain analogous to the way artists paint on canvas. By exploiting the regular nature of terrain data, we create pre-decided rendering depth orders for primitives for any camera orientation. With this, we avoid the necessity of sorting the primitives of sprites required for alpha blending. We use DirectX10/SM4.0 based shaders to render strokes to improve performance. Being distributed on terrain, strokes get cluttered when they are closely located on screen. We follow a level of detail scheme that maintains a uniform stroke density in screen space. Various styles can ...
Shiben Bhattacharjee, P. J. Narayanan