This is the abstract of a paper by Bruce and Amy Gooch, Peter-Pike J. Sloan, Peter Shirley, and Richard Riesenfeld on "Interactive Technical Illustration".

A rendering is an abstraction that favors, preserves, or even emphasizes some qualities while sacrificing, suppressing, or omitting other characteristics that are not the focus of attention. Most computer graphics rendering activities have been concerned with photorealism, i.e., trying to emulate an image that looks like a high-quality photograph. This laudable goal is useful and appropriate in many applications, but not in technical illustration where elucidation of structure and technical information is the preeminent motivation. This calls for a different kind of abstraction in which technical communication is central, but art and appearance are still essential instruments toward this end. Work that has been done on computer generated technical illustrations has focused on static images, and has not included all of the techniques used to hand draw technical illustrations.

A paradigm for the display of technical illustrations in a dynamic environment is presented. This display environment includes all of the benefits of computer generated technical illustrations, such as a clearer picture of shape, structure, and material composition than traditional computer graphics methods. It also includes the three-dimensional interactive strength of modern display systems. This is accomplished by using new algorithms for real time drawing of silhouette curves, algorithms which solve a number of the problems inherent in previous methods. We incorporate current non-photorealistic lighting methods, and augment them with new shadowing algorithms based on accepted techniques used by artists and studies carried out in human perception.

This paper, all of the images, and a mpeg video clip are available at http://www.cs.utah.edu/~bgooch/ITI/.

Name: Bruce Gooch, Amy Gooch
Affiliation: University of Utah School of Computing
Address: 50 South Campus Drive, Room 3190, Salt Lake City, UT   84112

Email address: bgooch@cs.utah.edu, gooch@cs.utah.edu

Bruce Gooch

is a graduate student in Computer Science at the University of Utah. He has worked for Ford and for Bacon and Davis Inc. conducting research in the areas of time dependent three dimensional magnetic fields, and corrosion defect prediction in gas and oil pipelines. Bruce earned a BS in Mathematics and a Masters
degree in Computer Science from the University of Utah. Bruce is a National Science Foundation fellowship awardee. Bruce is the author of over a dozen research papers and technical reports in the area of non-photorealistic rendering (NPR). He is also a coauthor of the book "Non Photorealistic Rendering" which was published by A.K. Peters in 2001. His current research focuses on using non photorealistic rendering to communicate shape, structure, and material properties in automatically drawn illustrations.

Amy Ashurst Gooch

is a researcher for the Visual Simulation Group in the School of Computing at the University of Utah. Amy earned her BS in Computer Engineering and MS in Computer Science from the University of Utah. While working on her Masters degree in Computer Science, she explored interactive non-photorealistic technical illustration as a new rendering paradigm. In addition to presenting a paper at SIGGRAPH 1998 and at the SIGGRAPH 1999 course on Non-Photorealistic Rendering, she has co-authored the first book in the field, Non-Photorealistic Rendering, published by AK Peters, 2001. Her current research focuses on the visual perception of scale and depth in immersive environments.