NPR Rendering
During the year 1998 I had a teacher at ESME called Antoine Clappier (former CEO of EOVIA, now leading Oloneo). He was the founder of a small french (and now defunct) company called RAYflect. RAYflect made plug-ins for Raydream Studio, 3D Studio MAX and Photoshop, and was a well-known name in the rendering world. Antoine was my Computer Graphics teacher for one year, and he (re)introduced me to the SIGGRAPH-related stuff, which I already knew and liked, but I admit my primary interest was realtime graphics. However, having the opportunity to speak with him, I removed the dust from my CG-related papers and started rediscovering them. In the SIGGRAPH’97 Proceedings I found some very nice articles about Non-Photorealistic Rendering (NPR). I really liked them, and since they were quite simple to code, well, I just did it. I started with the impressionist style, learnt about edge detection, Sobel and Laplace filters, that kind of things. That was so nice that a friend of mine and I wrote a complete paper about the history of painting and how we can compare it to the CG evolution, how to draw relationships between them, etc. Nowadays you can do cartoon rendering in hardware with DX or GL, but there’s a lot more to NPR than that. To get the best-looking effects, you need to use strokes of different sizes and orientations, and that’s definitely something even cube mapping can’t buy you. I also read some more SIGGRAPH papers about image techniques, and played for a while with a steerable pyramid – another great tool.