ConTesse: Accurate Occluding Contours for Subdivision Surfaces

• Chenxi Liu¹
• Pierre Bénard²
• Aaron Hertzmann³
• Shayan Hoshyari⁴

• ¹ University of British Columbia
• ² Univ. Bordeaux, CNRS, Bordeaux INP, Inria, LaBRI
• ³ Adobe Research
• ⁴ Adobe

Abstract

This paper proposes a method for computing the visible occluding contours of subdivision surfaces. The paper first introduces new theory for contour visibility of smooth surfaces. Necessary and sufficient conditions are introduced for when a sampled occluding contour is valid, that is, when it may be assigned consistent visibility. Previous methods do not guarantee these conditions, which helps explain why smooth contour visibility has been such a challenging problem in the past. The paper then proposes an algorithm that, given a subdivision surface, finds sampled contours satisfying these conditions, and then generates a new triangle mesh matching the given occluding contours. The contours of the output triangle mesh may then be rendered with standard non-photorealistic rendering algorithms, using the mesh for visibility computation. The method can be applied to any triangle mesh, by treating it as the base mesh of a subdivision surface.

Paper

• HAL version
• Official ACM Digital Library link
• Scientific American summary article

Downloads

• Supplementary materials (results in PDFs) ZIP (1.2 GB)
• Data (test mesh inputs) ZIP (101 MB)

Code

• Github repository

Additional Results

(Public domain Pig, ogre, and Spot models by Keenan Crane, Killeroo © headus.com.au, Bigguy and Monster Frog © Bay Raitt, Walking Man © Ryan Dale)

@article{Liu:2023,
  title = {ConTesse: Accurate Occluding Contours for Subdivision Surfaces},
  author = {Liu, Chenxi and B\'{e}nard, Pierre and Hertzmann, Aaron and Hoshyari, Shayan},
  year = {2023},
  journal = {ACM Trans. Graph.},
  month = feb,
  volume = {42},
  number = {1},
  articleno = {5},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.1145/3544778},
  doi = {10.1145/3544778}
}