History assisted view authoring for 3D models

Abstract

3D modelers often wish to showcase their models for sharing or review purposes. This may consist of generating static viewpoints of the model or authoring animated fly-throughs. Manually creating such views is often tedious and few automatic methods are designed to interactively assist the modelers with the view authoring process. We present a view authoring assistance system that supports the creation of informative view points, view paths, and view surfaces, allowing modelers to author the interactive navigation experience of a model. The key concept of our implementation is to analyze the model's workflow history, to infer important regions of the model and representative viewpoints of those areas. An evaluation indicated that the viewpoints generated by our algorithm are comparable to those manually selected by the modeler. In addition, participants of a user study found our system easy to use and effective for authoring viewpoint summaries.