Real-Time Oil Painting on Mobile Hardware

This paper presents a realistic digital oil painting system, specifically targeted at the real-time performance on highly resource constrained portable hardware such as tablets and iPads. To effectively use the limited computing power, we develop an efficient adaptation of the Shallow Water Equations that models all the characteristic properties of oil paint. The pigments are stored in a multi-layered structure to model the peculiar nature of pigment mixing in oil paint. The user experience ranges from thick shape-retaining strokes to runny diluted paint that reacts naturally to the gravity set by tablet orientation. Finally, the paint is rendered in real-time using a combination of carefully chosen efficient rendering techniques. The virtual lighting adapts to the tablet orientation, or alternatively, the front-facing camera captures the lighting environment, which leads to a truly immersive user experience. Our proposed features are evaluated via a user study. In our experience, our system enables artists to quickly try out ideas and compositions anywhere when inspiration strikes, in a truly ubiquitous way. They don’t need to carry expensive and messy oil paint supplies.