Concurrent Drainage Network Rendering for Automated Pen‐and‐ink Style Landscape Illustration

Abstract

Pen-and-ink style geomorphological illustrations render landscape elements critical to the understanding of surface processes within a viewshed and, at their highest levels of execution, represent works of art, being both practical and beautiful. The execution of a pen-and-ink composition, however, requires inordinate amounts of time and skill. This article will introduce an algorithm for rendering creaseslinework representing visually significant morphological features -at animation speeds, made possible with recent advances in graphics processing unit (GPU) architectures and rendering APIs. Beginning with a preprocessed high-resolution drainage network model, creases are rendered from selected stream segments if their weighted criteria (slope, flow accumulation, and surface illumination), attenuated by perspective distance from the viewpoint, exceed a threshold. The algorithm thus provides a methodology for crease representation at continuous levels of detail down to the highest resolution of the preprocessed drainage model over a range of surface orientation and illumination conditions. The article also presents an implementation of the crease algorithm with frame rates exceeding those necessary to support animation, supporting the proposition that parallel processing techniques exposed through modern GPU programming environments provide cartographers with a new and inexpensive toolkit for constructing alternative and attractive real-time animated landscape visualizations for spatial analysis.