Message in a Bottle: Stylized Rendering of Sand Movies

Stylized rendering, usually referred as non-photorealistic rendering, aims to reproduce artistic techniques in renderings, trying to express feelings and moods on the rendered scenes, as opposed to realistic rendering techniques, that aim to produce realistic renderings of artificial scenes. In this paper, we present a stylized rendering technique that aims to create synthetic sand-filled bottles, simulating a typical art craft from the northeastern region of Brazil, that usually depicts landscape images. A method for generating 2D procedural sand textures is presented, and two new techniques that mimic effects created by the artists using their tools are introduced. The technique is also used to generate stylized videos, something close to impossible in real life with this technique. The temporal coherence within these stylized videos can be enforced on individual objects with the aid of a video segmentation algorithm. The techniques were used on synthetic and real videos, and several snapshots from these videos are shown here.