Paper shadow art

Abstract

Artists skillfully make several paper shapes in 3D to create different images using the shadows they cast. It is a creative art form called Paper Shadow Art. Central to this art is finding a small set of developable surfaces so that the shadow images match the desired images. However, it is challenging for users to imagine and generate developable surfaces for their desired images. To this end, we present a computational method for paper shadow art designs. The key is to convert the problem of generating piecewise developable surfaces for multiple images into one for a single image separately, subsequently merging the generated piecewise developable surfaces into the final result. Specifically, given an image, we optimize a height field to approach developability with two requirements: 1) for this image, there is no shadow deviation; 2) for other images, the shadows (projected onto their planes) of the optimized height field fall into them. To better satisfy the second requirement, we develop an iterative algorithm that alternates in each iteration between optimizing the height fields and deforming the input images, both to reduce the deviations. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method over various examples. Its practicality is also proved by seven physical results with paper sheets.

Graphical abstract

Keywords

piecewise paper shadow art / developable surfaces / height field optimization

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