NPAR (Non-Photorealistic Animation and Rendering) 2009 finished wrapped today and I found it entirely compelling. Stunning keynotes from Disney/Pixar and Ubisoft reminded me of why I’m so interested in graphics - pretty pictures.

Going into this, I had anticipated that I would be far out-shined by the presenters and papers, but now more than ever I feel as though I can really compete with these guys.

I’m still sort of shopping for a thesis, and there are a million ideas I’ve come across here to develop. I’m keeping a list of techniques I’d like to apply to these problems and a list of projects and things to implement hopefully in a weekend. A non-exhaustive list would include:

• feature lines in raytracing
• stippling
• perfect tiling of patterns on arbitrary meshes
• exploring space-filling curves

Thank you to all the presenters and keynote speakers - you were all fantastic. And thanks to all the planners and sponsors of the conference.