Caricaturing Buildings for Effective Visualization

Caricature Creation In this stage, we create abstract caricatures using all features as disconnected pieces. Using disconnected pieces is partly motivated by cubist sculptures such as Pablo Picasso‘s {Reclining Bather}. Individual pieces also allow faster shape modification. Each unique feature is represented by at least one disconnected 3D surface. Therefore, it is easy to improve 3D recognizability of the caricature shapes by changing the position, shape and size of each feature. As a side note: In both cases, disconnected pieces are modeled by using polygonal meshes. Final Modeling and Rendering Once the shape that is constructed with disconnected pieces is confirmed to be a likeness of the building, we create final surface that closely approximates the confirmed shape. In order to render our caricatures, we have developed an Ambient Occlusion shader for Maya, using C++ and the Maya API. The Ambient Occlusion shader reinforces areas of subtle relief on the models and provides a clean, consistent look to the final images. We only use limited amount of textures and colors to ensure that the shapes alone provide the recognizability of the caricature. Implementation and Results We use the building caricatures in interactive visualizations, mostly, interactive pictorial maps. The simplicity of these caricatures allows interactive viewing of pictorial maps in internet. The Figure 6 shows a caricature of Coliseum in Rome. We have also created a wide range of caricatures of landmark buildings such as Notre Dame and Hagia Sophia. Some of the interactive visualizations are available in the web page www-viz.tamu.edu/faculty/ergun/ ipm/index.html.