SHAD3S: A model to Sketch, Shade and Shadow

Abstract

Hatching is a common method used by artists to accentuate the third dimension of a sketch, and to illuminate the scene. Our system SHAD3S 1 attempts to compete with a human at hatching generic three-dimensional (3D) shapes, and also tries to assist her in a form exploration exercise. The novelty of our approach lies in the fact that we make no assumptions about the input other than that it represents a 3D shape, and yet, given a contextual information of illumination and texture, we synthesise an accurate hatch pattern over the sketch, without access to 3D or pseudo 3D. In the process, we contribute towards a) a cheap yet effective method to synthesise a sufficiently large high fidelity dataset, pertinent to task; b) creating a pipeline with conditional generative adversarial network (CGAN); and c) creating an interactive utility with GIMP, that is a tool for artists to engage with automated hatching or a formexploration exercise. User evaluation of the tool suggests that the model performance does generalise satisfactorily over diverse input, both in terms of style as well as shape. A simple comparison of inception scores suggest that the generated distribution is as diverse as the ground truth.