Hardware Support for Non-photorealistic Rendering

Abstract

Special features such as ridges, valleys and silhouettes, of a polygonal scene are usually displayed by explicitly identifying and then rendering 'edges' for the corresponding geometry. The candidate edges are identified using the connectivity information, which requires preprocessing of the data. We present a nonobvious but surprisingly simple to implement technique to render such features without connectivity information or preprocessing. At the hardware level, based only on the vertices of a given flat polygon, we introduce new polygons, with appropriate color, shape and orientation, so that they eventually appear as special features.