History Assisted View Authoring for 3D Models

Abstract3D modelers often wish to showcase their models and associated workflows for review, tutorials, and visualization purposes. This may consist of generating static viewpoints across versions of the model, or authoring animated flythroughs. Unfortunately, manual creation of such content is often tedious, and automatic techniques are limited. We present a novel system that supports the automatic creation of informative view points, view paths, and view surfaces to create interactive summaries and viewpoint collages of a model. By spanning across multiple versions of a model, these summaries can be used to convey both geometric and temporal aspects of the 3D model and its associated workflow history. The key concept of our implementation is to analyze the model’s workflow history, to infer important regions of the model and good viewpoints of those areas. An initial user study indicates that modelers find our system easy to use and provides an efficient alternative for authoring viewpoint summaries.