A Semi-automatic Oriental Ink Painting Framework for Robotic Drawing from 3D Models

TL;DR

This paper introduces a semi-automatic framework that enables robotic arms to create stylized oriental ink paintings directly from 3D models, combining simulation, user interaction, and optimized robotic control.

Contribution

It presents a novel framework that extracts and stylizes strokes from 3D models and employs a robotic arm for physically accurate ink painting in traditional styles.

Findings

Successfully rendered stylized ink paintings from 3D models

Demonstrated the framework's ability to produce expressive strokes

Validated the approach with multiple 3D models

Abstract

Creating visually pleasing stylized ink paintings from 3D models is a challenge in robotic manipulation. We propose a semi-automatic framework that can extract expressive strokes from 3D models and draw them in oriental ink painting styles by using a robotic arm. The framework consists of a simulation stage and a robotic drawing stage. In the simulation stage, geometrical contours were automatically extracted from a certain viewpoint and a neural network was employed to create simplified contours. Then, expressive digital strokes were generated after interactive editing according to user's aesthetic understanding. In the robotic drawing stage, an optimization method was presented for drawing smooth and physically consistent strokes to the digital strokes, and two oriental ink painting styles termed as Noutan (shade) and Kasure (scratchiness) were applied to the strokes by robotic control of a brush's translation, dipping and scraping. Unlike existing methods that concentrate on generating paintings from 2D images, our framework has the advantage of rendering stylized ink paintings from 3D models by using a consumer-grade robotic arm. We evaluate the proposed framework by taking 3 standard models and a user-defined model as examples. The results show that our framework is able to draw visually pleasing oriental ink paintings with expressive strokes.