Proxy Painting: Digital Colorization of Real-world Objects

For archaeologists, it is often desirable to present statues in their original material and coloration. With projection mapping, real-world surfaces are augmented by digital content to create compelling alterations of the scene’s visual appearance without actually altering or even damaging the object. While there are frequent advances in projection quality, content creation is still a challenging and often unintuitive task, especially for non-experts. In our system, we combine the advantages of digital content creation, such as rapid prototyping, with the convenience of an analog workflow. Users paint on smaller versions of the projection mapping target, employing real-world brushes and pencils, while the results are presented live on its large counterpart. We further demonstrate the integration of our system into a state-of-art game engine. By leveraging a powerful rendering and material workflow, we make creating compelling materials and lighting situations an intuitive experience.