Interactive Cutaway Illustrations

In this paper we discuss different approaches to generate cutaway illustrations. The purpose of such a drawing is to allow the viewer to have a look into an otherwise solid opaque object. Traditional methods to draw these kinds of illustrations are evaluated to extract a small and effective set of rules for a computer-based rendering of cutaway illustrations. We show that our approaches are not limited to a specific rendering style but can be successfully combined with a great variety of well-known artistic or technical illustration techniques. All methods of this paper make use of modern graphics hardware functionality to achieve interactive frame rates.