The Synthesis of Trees in Chinese Landscape Painting

Abstract

Trees are one of the essential painting subjects in Chinese landscape painting. In this thesis we present a set of methods for automatically drawing three-dimensional trees in Chinese ink painting style. A given three-dimensional tree model is drawn by image-based outline rendering and texture generation according to the information captured from the shape, shade and orientation of surface. Four reference maps are constructed to analyze the information and then create the brush strokes of outline, bark texture, and to determine inking parameters of washing tone. We are able to draw different styles of bark texture by procedurally defining the texture patterns. These analytical painting algorithms can be extended to draw other subjects in Chinese ink painting style. We demonstrate the results of our method with the accompanying still images and animations.

Keyword: Non-Photorealistic Rendering (NPR), Chinese Landscape Painting, TS'UN, Texture Strokes, Silhouette, Curvature Map, Brush, and Texture Generation.

(Full thesis: 2.35MB) (Animation: 8.54MB)

The results were published at WSCG2002 (paper) and IWAIT2002 (BEST PAPER AWARD)(paper).