The synthesis of trees in Chinese landscape painting using silhouette and texture strokes

Abstract

Practiced for more than three thousand years, Chinese painting emphasizes "implicit meaning", and involves painters' using a minimal number of brush strokes to express their deepest feelings. Landscapes are one of the most important themes in Chinese painting, Trees are the essential painting objects. This paper presents a set of novel methods to automatically draw trees in Chinese ink painting from 3D polygonal models. Outline rendering and texture generation uses the information of the silhouette, shade and orientation of three-dimensional model's surface to draw a particular tree. Four reference maps are established to analyze the information for the bark texture. These methods can draw various styles of bark texture by defining the texture patterns. Finally, this paper demonstrates some results obtained with our method.