TexToons: practical texture mapping for hand-drawn cartoon animations

We present a novel and practical texture mapping algorithm for hand-drawn cartoons that allows the production of visually rich animations with minimal user effort. Unlike previous techniques, our approach works entirely in the 2D domain and does not require the knowledge or creation of a 3D proxy model. Inspired by the fact that the human visual system tends to focus on the most salient features of a scene, which we observe for hand-drawn cartoons are the contours rather than the interior of regions, we can create the illusion of temporally coherent animation using only rough 2D image registration. This key observation allows us to design a simple yet effective algorithm that significantly reduces the amount of manual labor required to add visually complex detail to an animation, thus enabling efficient cartoon texturing for computer-assisted animation production pipelines. We demonstrate our technique on a variety of input animations as well as provide examples of postprocessing operations that can be applied to simulate 3D-like effects entirely in the 2D domain.