Efficient and Dynamic Simplification of Line Drawings

Abstract In this paper we present a pipeline for rendering dynamic 2D/3D line drawings efficiently. Our main goal is to create efficient static renditions and coherent animations of line drawings in a setting where lines can be added, deleted and arbitrarily transformed on‐the‐fly. Such a dynamic setting enables us to handle interactively sketched 2D line data, as well as arbitrarily transformed 3D line data in a unified manner. We evaluate the proximity of screen projected strokes to simplify them while preserving their continuity. We achieve this by using a special data structure that facilitates efficient proximity calculations in a dynamic setting. This on‐the‐fly proximity evaluation also facilitates generation of appropriate visibility cues to mitigate depth ambiguities and visual clutter for 3D line data. As we perform all these operations using only line data, we can create line drawings from 3D models without any surface information. We demonstrate the effectiveness and applicability of our approach by showing several examples with initial line representations obtained from a variety of sources: 2D and 3D hand‐drawn sketches and 3D salient geometry lines obtained from 3D surface representations.