Real-time hand-painted graphics for mobile games

Abstract

In this paper we set out to find a digital painting technique which allows the recreation of scenes from children's books or graphic novels for usage in mobile games. The idea is to give the impression that scenes are being hand-painted at the moment the player is moving through them. To this end, we propose a technique for digital painting, mesh-based strokes, that combines the strengths of existing painting techniques while keeping the limitations of mobile devices in mind. In this new technique, instead of representing strokes as pixels in a raster, strokes are created as flat meshes following the contour of a brush stroke. Furthermore, in close cooperation with artists digital painting and animation tools are introduced to facilitate the creation of new digital brushes and scenes in order to capture the style from children's books. In this paper, the Bo children's book series is used as a case study [1]. We believe our system is effective in terms of ease-of-use, performs better on mobile hardware than traditional techniques and offers a new fresh perspective on stylised animation in mobile games. © 2014 Springer International Publishing.