SmartShadow: Artistic Shadow Drawing Tool for Line Drawings

Lvmin Zhang, Jinyue Jiang, Yi Ji, Chunping Liu; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021, pp. 5391-5400

SmartShadow is a deep learning application for digital painting artists to draw shadows on line drawings, with three proposed tools. (1) Shadow brush: artists can draw scribbles to coarsely indicate the areas inside or outside their wanted shadows, and the application will generate the shadows in real-time. (2) Shadow boundary brush: this brush can precisely control the boundary of any specific shadow. (3) Global shadow generator: this tool can estimate the global shadow direction from input brush scribbles, and then consistently propagate local shadows to the entire image. These three tools can not only speed up the shadow drawing process (by 3.1 times as experiments validate), but also allow for the flexibility to achieve various shadow effects and facilitate richer artistic creations. To this end, we train Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) with a collected large-scale dataset of both real and synthesized data, and especially, we collect 1670 shadow samples drawn by real artists. Both qualitative analysis and user study show that our approach can generate high-quality shadows that are practically usable in the daily works of digital painting artists. We present 30 additional results and 15 visual comparisons in the supplementary materiel.