A virtual Chinese hairy brush model for E-learning

The increasing demands of education, reduction of study cost and study without location limitation have encouraged developers providing different types of learning and educational systems. This paper presents a virtual Chinese hairy brush painting environment which can be used as a digital tool for learning or creating Chinese calligraphy or Chinese painting. The framework comprises two components: brush geometry model and brush dynamic model. Instead of simulating the brush using bristles, we use points to simulate the whole brush bundle, which can drastically decrease the complexity inherent in the conventional bristle-level approach; our brush dynamic model describes the behavior of the real brush's deformation in terms of the interaction of the external and internal forces with the virtual writing paper. A spring network is derived to calculate the physical deflection of brush according to the force exerted on it. A prototype system has been implemented based on this framework, with which high-quality digital painting and calligraphy artwork can be produced. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.