Hardware-Accelerated Interactive Illustrative Stipple Drawing of Polygonal Objects

Pen and ink rendering techniques provide artistic, illustrative, and informative representations of objects. With recent advances in hardware graphics technology, several researchers have developed interactive non-photorealistic rendering techniques, including hatching, toon rendering, and silhouettes. However, the stippling method of drawing and shading using dots has not received as much focus. In this paper, we present an interactive system for stipple drawing of surface-based objects that provides illustrative stipple renderings of multiple objects and includes adaptation of the stippling to provide a consistent rendering of objects at any scale. We also describe the use of the latest graphics hardware capabilities for accelerating the rendering by performing the silhouette rendering on the GPU and the stipple density enhancement calculations as a vertex program.