Diffusion Curves

[Arwin]

There's lots of interesting Siggraph demos on youtube I just discovered. Somehow I find this really interesting:

It's a very interesting technique. No idea how innovative it is Couldn't you make an amazing game engine out of this for instance? What if a new Loco Roco type game used this? And it could be an amazing step up for vector graphics.

Edit: cool, here's the original site, and it actually contains a demo tool you can try them out with yourself!

http://artis.imag.fr/Publications/2008/OBWBTS08/

Wonder if you could create 3D rendering engines based on a 3d version of these algorithms. Anyone here have any idea whether that's possible?

I'm imagining all sorts of weird things like using ray-tracing in combination with this to just calculate lighting (color/shadow) to the key points defined in the diffusion curve to have some very efficient lighting effects.

Can't get the tool to work myself yet though unfortunately.

 

[Simon F]

Having seen last year's vector graphics presentation (as mentioned), this is quite interesting, but it surely must be horrendous to shade rapidly.

 

[Arwin]

Well, I'd focus on getting it to work in the first place, and leave shading for the future.

I'm not at all an artist, so with that in mind my little experiments led to this very simple drawing. All you do is draw lines, and then decide which color should be on each side, and how much diffusion each of these sides should have. For instance the light-blue in the eye is highly diffuse, whereas the iris is much less diffuse and the eyebrow is not diffuse.