Computer‐assisted Relief Modelling: A Comprehensive Survey

As an art form between drawing and sculpture, relief has been widely used in a variety of media for signs, narratives, decorations and other purposes. Traditional relief creation relies on both professional skills and artistic expertise, which is extremely time‐consuming. Recently, automatic or semi‐automatic relief modelling from a 3D object or a 2D image has been a subject of interest in computer graphics. Various methods have been proposed to generate reliefs with few user interactions or minor human efforts, while preserving or enhancing the appearance of the input. This survey provides a comprehensive review of the advances in computer‐assisted relief modelling during the past decade. First, we provide an overview of relief types and their art characteristics. Then, we introduce the key techniques of object‐space methods and image‐space methods respectively. Advantages and limitations of each category are discussed in details. We conclude the report by discussing directions for possible future research.