Computer-Aided Rendering of Chinese Meticulous Figure Paintings

Meticulous figure painting is a traditional Chinese art form in which objects are depicted with fine details. Coloring objects in meticulous figure painting by hand is however tedious and time consuming. This paper presents a rendering algorithm to speed up this coloring process and the resulting renders still retain the style of Chinese meticulous figure paintings. We first extract the contour line and obtain regions for the face, hair, limbs and clothes of painted figures interactively. For the face region, we add simple auxiliary lines interactively to specify the light and dark areas, and then use a simple iterative dampened-spring diffuser to generate the gray scale shading of the whole area. For the regions of limbs and clothes, an automatic method is proposed to render their shadings. For the hair region, we take the hand drawn hair lines as the high frequency components, and then smooth it with a Gaussian filter to obtain the low frequency components, and blend them to get the final rendered hair. For other small parts such as headwear, we process them with simple interactions. Compared with hand painted art works, our rendering results look satisfactory.