A Demo of iR2s Software: Interactive Oriental Ink Painting Tool

In recent years, painterly rendering techniques have achieved remarkable success for simulating water color, oil and oriental ink paintings. Many artistic filters, such as [DeCarlo and Santella 2002; Collomosse and Hall 2006] have been proposed for converting real photos into painting style by applying the global operation with minimum user interaction. Although artistic filters are particularly suitable for impressionism and impasto by clustering the same color pixels into simple geometrical pieces as strokes and simulating the overlapping of these strokes, they hardly achieve oriental ink painting effect. The reason is that oriental ink painting embeds all scene information, such as color, texture, shape and light sources into few abstract strokes. The shapes of the oriental ink strokes therefore are not simple as bended rectangles but contain more complex changes. Alternatively, sketch-based approaches provide users with more flexibility and control by allowing them to interact the system. In previous sketch-based approaches, such as [Okabe et al. 2007], the user sketches the brush trajectories using a mouse or a pen-like device. The system then automatically converts the trajectories into strokes. The limitation of inputting the trajectories is that the user loses the control to generate the shapes of the strokes. In our system, the user sketches the boundaries of the strokes as the input. It overcomes the drawback of losing the control of the shape as well as inherits the advantage of the draft drawing that is efficient for designing the composition of the painting by contours of the strokes when the idea comes out. In our previous work [Xie et al. 2010], we proposed a framework for interactively rendering real images into oriental ink paintings. The distinct feature is that it can handle a large variety of brush shapes and styles which cannot be generated by previous methods. In this paper, we focus on the implementation details of the software and design aspects of the user interface.