In "Composition Principles for Quality Depiction and Aesthetics" (Rivotti et al), Vera Rivotti and Loao Proenca presented ways to apply traditional art composition ideas of balance, unity, and especially emphasis to computer graphics. They suggested using a combination of silhouettes, feature-lines, and suggestive contours for line-drawn NPR, adaptively lowering the edge detection threshold to emphasize certain parts of an object. They also suggested changing the color properties of a scene, such as contrast, saturation, and value to draw the eye to specific areas. Dynamic image-space contrast could be particularly applicable to an adventure game where you may want to emphasize certain objects in a scene, such as those that can be picked up or otherwise manipulated. I figure, you could render the scene to a low resolution emphasis texture, giving higher value to objects of greater emphasis, run a blur filter over it, and apply it to the screen with a pixel shader that manipulates contrast and saturation depending on the values of the emphasis texels.
Daniel German, a photographer, discussed various panoramic projection methods in "New Methods to Project Panoramas for Practical and Aesthetic Purposes" and "Flattening the Viewable Sphere" (German et al). These presentations explored a variety of projection formats, each with different properties, which could probably be applied to environment mapping.
They gave us a really nice book of the proceedings, complete with color images, Someone is giving a talk on Ambient Occlusion tomorrow which should be really interesting, as well as NPR and some other things. I was hoping to do some coding while I'm here, but thats obviously not going to happen. Banff is lovely as always, and I think some hiking may be in order for tomorrow.
