The ubiquity of computer-generated imagery around us, in movies, advertising or on the Internet is already being taken for granted and what impresses most people is the photorealistic quality of the images. Pictures, as we have often been told, are worth a thousand words and the information transported by an image can take many different forms. Many computer graphics researchers are exploring non-photorealistic rendering techniques as an alternative to realistic rendering. Defined by what it is not, non-photorealistic rendering brings art and science together, concentrating less on the process and more on the communication content of an image. Techniques that have long been used by artists can be applied to computer graphics to emphasize subtle attributes and to omit extraneous information. This book provides an overview of the published research on non-photorealistic rendering in order to categorize and distill the current research into a body of usable techniques. A summary of some of the algorithms as well as pseudo-code for producing some of the images is included.
