We describe quality and performance enhancements, which work in real-time, to all well-known Non-photorealistic (NPR) rendering styles for use in an interactive context. These include Comic rendering, Sketch rendering, Hatching and Painterly rendering, but we also attempt and justify a widening of the established definition of what is considered NPR. In the individual Chapters, we identify typical stylistic elements of the different NPR styles. We list problems that need to be solved in order to implement the various renderers. Standard solutions available in the literature are introduced and in all cases extended and optimised. In particular, we extend the lighting model of the comic renderer to include a specular component and introduce multiple inter-related but independent geometric approximations which greatly improve rendering performance. We implement two completely different solutions to random perturbation sketching, solve temporal coherence issues for coal sketching and find an unexpected use for 3D textures to implement hatch-shading. Textured brushes of painterly rendering are extended by properties such as stroke-direction and texture, motion, paint capacity, opacity and emission, making them more flexible and versatile. Brushes are also provided with a minimal amount of intelligence, so that they can help in maximising screen coverage of brushes. We furthermore devise a completely new NPR style, which we call super-realistic and show how sample images can be tweened in real-time to produce an image-based six degree-of-freedom renderer performing at roughly 450 frames per second. Performance values for our other renderers all lie between 10 and over 400 frames per second on homePC hardware, justifying our real-time claim. A large number of sample screen-shots, illustrations and animations demonstrate the visual fidelity of our rendered images. In essence, we successfully achieve our attempted goals of increasing the creative, expressive and communicative potential of individual NPR styles, increasing performance of most of them, adding original and interesting visual qualities, and exploring new techniques or existing ones in novel ways. / KMBT_363 / Adobe Acrobat 9.54 Paper Capture Plug-in

It has been empirically established that the differences in the lending rates charged by traditional and large lenders to large versus small creditors can be largely attributed to differences in information opacity (Dietrich, 2012; Holmes et. al. 1994). The greater the information possessed by the creditor, the lower the rate charged to the borrower, suggesting again that a risk premium is being charged for information opacity. Securitizing debt with collateral can reduce the lending rate charged, however differences in the rates charged cannot be fully explained by information opacity or availability of collateral. This dual study approach aims at increasing the understanding of loan pricing determinants. The first study uses data from the UK Survey of SME Finances, 2007 to explore factors internal and external to the firm that are significant in influencing credit prices, providing insight on why credit prices fluctuate from firm to firm. The second study uses interviews with firm owners in the Toronto computer animation and visual effects (CA&VFX) industries to effectively capture the intricacies and gain insight on the nuances involved in the pricing of credit for firms in these industries. The results of the first study suggest that the use of collateral, loan amount, loan duration, and firm size are significant credit pricing influencers while a firm’s strategic orientation, specifically product innovation and propensity to export, are of little importance. Results from the second study suggest that firm owner perceptions generally align with the extant literature on collateralization and relationships with lenders.

Magister Scientiae - MSc / The structure from motion (SfM) problem is that of determining 3-dimensional (3D) information of a scene from sequences of 2-dimensional (2D) images [59]. This information consists of object shape and motion and relative camera motion. In general, objects may undergo complex non-rigid motion and may be occluded by other objects or themselves. These aspects make the general SfM problem under-constrained and the solution subject to missing or incomplete data. / South Africa

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No / Advances in computer technology and developments such as the Internet provide a constant momentum to design new techniques and algorithms to support computer graphics. Modelling, animation and rendering remain principal topics in the filed of computer graphics and continue to attract researchers around the world." This volume contains the papers presented at Computer Graphics International 2002, in July, at the University of Bradford, UK. These papers represent original research in computer graphics from around the world

This work addresses various applications pertaining to the design, modelling and animation of parametric surfaces using elliptic Partial Differential Equations (PDE) which are produced via the PDE method. Compared with traditional surface generation techniques, the PDE method is an effective technique that can represent complex three-dimensional (3D) geometries in terms of a relatively small set of parameters. A PDE-based surface can be produced from a set of pre-configured curves that are used as the boundary conditions to solve a number of PDE. An important advantage of using this method is that most of the information required to define a surface is contained at its boundary. Thus, complex surfaces can be computed using only a small set of design parameters. In order to exploit the advantages of this methodology various applications were developed that vary from the interactive design of aircraft configurations to the animation of facial expressions in a computer-human interaction system that utilizes an artificial intelligence (AI) bot for real time conversation. Additional applications of generating cyclic motions for PDE based human character integrated in a Computer-Aided Design (CAD) package as well as developing techniques to describe a given mesh geometry by a set of boundary conditions, required to evaluate the PDE method, are presented. Each methodology presents a novel approach for interacting with parametric surfaces obtained by the PDE method. This is due to the several advantages this surface generation technique has to offer. Additionally, each application developed in this thesis focuses on a specific target that delivers efficiently various operations in the design, modelling and animation of such surfaces. / The project files will not be available online.

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