Master Thesis Introduction

Siran's Master Thesis Topic:

Bringing Cinematic Lighting Aesthetic into Traditional Chinese Ink-Brush Painting ‘Lotus Flowers’ in 3D Computer Graphics

In my research, I intend to merge traditional Chinese ‘Lotus Flowers’ Painting with cinematic lighting aesthetic in 3D computer graphics. The goal is to achieve a unique artistic style, which both preserves the tradition and essence of Chinese Painting, and brings more changes of light and color for mood enhancing and visual story telling. A workflow of shader-based Non-Photorealistic Rendering method combined with compositing technique will be developed to achieve the final look.

My Motivation and Introduction to My Topic:

Chinese painters have been using the ink-and-brush medium to create beautiful paintings on paper or silk scrolls for thousands of years. Traditional Chinese painting has distinctive characteristics. It does not emphasize one-point perspective nor does it aim to express the shades of color of a subject in relation to a fixed source of light as traditional western painting does. Thus, it usually does not have any physically accurate lighting, shading and shadow.

Fig 1. Lotus Painting by Chang Dai-chien(May 10, 1899 – April 2, 1983)

However, I have always wondered about and wanted to explore how traditional Chinese Ink-and-brush painting would look with the introduction of more change in lighting, and also how it would appear in digital media forms and displays. The inspiration behind this idea is closely related with my interests in cinematic lighting aesthetic. In the world of filmmaking and photography, cinematographers and lighting artists use light as a powerful tool for conveying mood and visual story telling. This is achieved by applying combinations of different lighting aspects such as quality, direction, color. Although they are very different considering the methods, tools and media being used, traditional Chinese ink-and-brush painting essence and cinematic lighting aesthetic share an important similarity – they both emphasize expressing the characteristics of the subject and the artist’s vision and emotion rather than just depicting a scene in a physically accurate way. This makes me interested in attempting to merge these two types of art together by introducing cinematic lighting aesthetic into Chinese ink-brush painting.

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Figure 2: Examples of cinematic lighting principles applied in movies for enhancing visual story telling: (a)screenshot from film ‘Blade Runner’(1982), in which, the director of photography (DP) used strong rim light and an extreme high lighting ratio to enhance mood. (b)screenshot from the film ‘House of Flying Daggers’(2004) where the DP used atmosphere effect to create drama and to separate out the main characters.

Instead of working with traditional media – ink, brush and paper, my research will be using tools and methods in 3D computer graphics. In recent years, lots of works have been done in computer graphics to recreate painterly rendering styles (including traditional Chinese ink-brush painting). And different Non-Photorealistic Rendering (NPR) workflows have been applied in 3D computer graphic animation productions to create beautiful works like the short-films Paperman (2012) and Twinings ‘Sea’ (2011). Both works have a graphic quality of a 2D hand-painting style and interesting changes of light and shadow for enhancing visual story telling. This motivated me to try bringing the Chinese ink-and-brush painting style into the 3D computer graphic world， and utilize the techniques in computer graphics for applying cinematic lighting principles into ink-brush painting

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Figure 3: Examples of 3D animation with painterly rendering style. (a) screenshot from short film ‘Paperman’(2012), in which NPR technique was developed to create a traditional 2D hand-drawn rendering style, while lighting and shading qualities of 3D animation are still maintained. (b) screenshot from the commercial ‘Twinings Sea’ (2011), where special shading and compositing workflow were used to create the oil painting look.

The goal of my research is to create a new type of Chinese ink-and-brush painting in CG, which preserves the tradition and essence of the original art form, while introducing changes of light for visual story telling. I chose Lotus Flower – a very popular subject in traditional Chinese ink-and-brush painting, as my subject matter in the work. And I will be mainly using Chang Daichien’s Lotus painting as my references (Fig. 1). The research will focus on 1) How to recreate an ink-and-brush painting style for different parts of Lotus (leaves, stems, pods, petals) utilizing NPR techniques. 2) How to bring in and handle the changes of lights and different render effects in Chinese ink-and-brush painting, which is commonly seen and comes free in physical cinematic lighting. This includes: the subsurface scattering effects which happen on organic surfaces, the reflection and highlights on water and plants, refraction, atmospheric effects, etc. 3) How to use cinematic lighting aesthetic in Chinese ink-and-brush painting to enhance mood and story-telling. The research will be focusing on the rendering aspect of 3D animation. Such aspects as animation and camera movement will not be explored in this project as they exceed the scope of the study. Also, the goal of this research will be recreating Chinese ink-and-brush painting through 3D computer graphics, so the tools and workflow developed in this research are not intended to be applied to any physical painting process.