The purpose of this thesis is to develop a texture-based painterly shader that would render computer generated objects or scenes with strokes that are visually similar to paint media like watercolor, oil paint or dry media such as crayons, chalk, et cetera. This method would need an input scene in the form of three dimensional polygonal or NURBS meshes. While the structure of the meshes and the lighting in the scene would both play a crucial role in the final appearance of the scene, the painterly look will be imparted through a shader. This method, therefore, is essentially a rendering technique. Several modifiable parameters in the shader gives the user artistic freedom while overall introducing some amount of automation in the painterly rendering process.

This thesis presents a way of automatically generating a landscape painting in the artistic style of Bob Ross. First, a relatively simple, yet effective and versatile, painting model is presented. The brushes of the painting model can be used on their own for creative applications or as a lower layer to the software components responsible for automation. Next, the brush strokes and parameters used to automatically paint eight different landscape features, each with its own adjustable attributes and randomized forms, are described. Finally, the placement of all of the automated landscape features required to achieve the layout of one of Bob Ross's landscape paintings is shown.

This thesis presents a way of automatically generating a landscape painting in the artistic style of Bob Ross. First, a relatively simple, yet effective and versatile, painting model is presented. The brushes of the painting model can be used on their own for creative applications or as a lower layer to the software components responsible for automation. Next, the brush strokes and parameters used to automatically paint eight different landscape features, each with its own adjustable attributes and randomized forms, are described. Finally, the placement of all of the automated landscape features required to achieve the layout of one of Bob Ross's landscape paintings is shown.

The purpose of this thesis is to develop a texture-based painterly shader that would render computer generated objects or scenes with strokes that are visually similar to paint media like watercolor, oil paint or dry media such as crayons, chalk, et cetera. This method would need an input scene in the form of three dimensional polygonal or NURBS meshes. While the structure of the meshes and the lighting in the scene would both play a crucial role in the final appearance of the scene, the painterly look will be imparted through a shader. This method, therefore, is essentially a rendering technique. Several modifiable parameters in the shader gives the user artistic freedom while overall introducing some amount of automation in the painterly rendering process.

This thesis describes two new techniques for enhancing the rendering quality of cartoon characters in toon-shading applications. The proposed methods can be used to improve the output quality of current cel shaders. The first technique which uses 2D image-based algorithms, enhances the silhouettes of the input geometry and reduces the computer generated artefacts. The silhouettes are found by using the Sobel filter and reconstructed by Bezier curve fitting. The intensity of the reconstructed silhouettes is then modified to create a stylised appearance. In the second technique, a new hair model based on billboarded particles is introduced. This method is found to be particularly useful for generating toon-like specular highlights for hair, which are important in cartoon animations. The whole rendering framework is implemented in C++ using the OpenGL API. OpenGL extensions and GPU programming are used to take the advantage of the functionalities of currently available graphics hardware. The programming of graphics hardware is done using Cg, a high level shader language.

Artists have been using brush strokes to generate abstractions and interpretations of the world they view, however this process is very time consuming. Many recent and diverse techniques attempt to mimic the process on a computer that an artist would go through to generate a painting; an area of research is a ectionately nick-named "painterly rendering". These applications emulate the effects of an artist's handiwork with dramatically less time invested in the process. I present a method to adapt painterly rendering for real-time simulations or video games, such that the images may appear to have been painted by hand. The work described in this document focuses on three problem areas posed for a real-time solution for painterly-rendering: brush stroke generation, temporal coherence between frames and performance. The solution presented here intends to solve these three fundamental issues with the intent to layer these methods on top of real-time applications using current generation consumer hardware. / Graduate

I am a painter with a huge attachment to objects. In this painting project I aim to make objects whose objecthood is formed by the collision of the different languages of both painting and sculpture – objects that negotiate the boundary line between traditional genre divisions. These objects react to one another, where an aspect of one suggests the next, so that they develop like an epidemic. And therefore this project functions in an accumulative way, where each work or body of work acts as a stepping-stone for the next, so that the objects descend from a common ancestor and have a common origin. The project is primarily installational in nature – in the sense that, although emphasis is put on the individual objects, they are viewed together in installations, not as separate entities. I aim to consider installation in terms of the language of painting, which constitutes the formal underpinning of my practice.

I am a painter with a huge attachment to objects. In this painting project I aim to make objects whose objecthood is formed by the collision of the different languages of both painting and sculpture – objects that negotiate the boundary line between traditional genre divisions. These objects react to one another, where an aspect of one suggests the next, so that they develop like an epidemic. And therefore this project functions in an accumulative way, where each work or body of work acts as a stepping-stone for the next, so that the objects descend from a common ancestor and have a common origin. The project is primarily installational in nature – in the sense that, although emphasis is put on the individual objects, they are viewed together in installations, not as separate entities. I aim to consider installation in terms of the language of painting, which constitutes the formal underpinning of my practice.

Research and development of Non-Photorealistic Rendering algorithms has recently moved towards the use of computer vision algorithms to extract image features. The feature representation capabilities of image moments could be used effectively for the selection of brush-stroke characteristics for painterly-rendering applications. This technique is based on the estimation of local geometric features from the intensity distribution in small windowed images to obtain the brush size, color and direction. This thesis proposes an improvement of this method, by additionally extracting the connected components so that the adjacent regions of similar color are grouped for generating large and noticeable brush-stroke images. An iterative coarse-to-fine rendering algorithm is developed for painting regions of varying color frequencies. Improvements over the existing technique are discussed with several examples.

The collection of paintings entitled SURROUNDINGS is based on my long-term interest in observing the everyday world. In the diploma work, I return to my family, to my home village. I look at my surroundings with gratitude and nostalgia. With gratitude for such a carefree, loving childhood, for the diligence that our parents taught us from an early age. I look nostalgically at what remains the same around the village so far, and regret at everything that changes. During the creative process, I explore maps, recording the shapes of ponds, houses and roads. However, I narrow the resulting set of paintings to the local forests, their transformations and work in them. Paintings with repeating patterns look at first glance with an emptied aesthetic impression, like a purely thematic prank. In fact, I bring personal experience into this decorative repetition, repetitive family stories that have happened, are happening and that I want to capture with this stylized form.