Real-Time Non-Photorealistic Animation for Immersive Storytelling in "Age of Sail"

Immersive media such as virtual and augmented reality pose some interesting new challenges for non-photorealistic animation: we must not only balance the screen-space rules of a 2D visual style against 3D motion coherence, but also account for stereo spatialization and interactive camera movement, at a rate of 90 frames per second. We introduce two new real-time rendering techniques: MetaTexture, an example-based texturing method that adheres to the movement of 3D geometry while preserving the texture’s screen-space characteristics, and Edge Breakup, a method for roughening edges by warping with structured noise. We also describe a custom rendering pipeline featuring art-directable coloring, shadow filtering, and texture indication, and our approach to animating and rendering a painterly ocean in real time. We show how we have used these techniques to achieve the “moving illustration” style of the real-time immersive short film “Age of Sail”.