Supporting Automated Pen and Ink Style Surface Illustration with B-Spline Models

This paper introduces a methodology for constructing pen and ink style landscape illustrations using B-spline surface models. Following a brief discussion of manual methods and recent developments in automated non-photorealistic rendering (NPR) techniques, the paper discusses polynomial models for surface rendering and their implementation in the OpenGL graphics interface. It then discusses the generation of silhouettes and form lines for topographic surfaces from a set of triangulated vertices obtained from polygonal tessellations. An implementation of the methodology outlined in the paper is described and tested. The results are analyzed and suggestions for further research are presented.