Video Cubism

We present new non-photorealistic (NPR) rendering tools for video. Inspired by the Cubist and Futurist art movements that questioned previous notions of space and time within paintings, we view an input video as a space-time cube of data, rather than a series of static frames. Our tools process the video as a whole to produce a set of stroke-solids, units for rendering that appear over multiple frames in the resulting NPR video. Depending on stylistic considerations and video content, each stroke solid is encoded with parameters such as location, size, curvature, orientation, color values, or other relevant information. A non-photorealistic video is constructed interactively by compositing slices of the stroke solids. These slices, or strokes, are rendered as multi-textured sprites. The textures for each stroke may be derived from a pre-defined texture atlas and/or drawn from the underlying video itself. Many of the parameters that define the appearance of a stroke are set at runtime. This provides the artist with a wealth of interactive aesthetic controls for modifying the final result. Benefits of our work include interactive stylistic flexibility and aesthetic control, and methods for exploiting the full temporal information present in a video sequence when designing the stroke solids. Finally, this work extends painterly rendering of video beyond the impressionist styles previously explored to Cubist, Futurist, and Abstract styles.