Patent ID: 7936927

Claim:
A method for making a stroke-based animation with temporal coherence, the method comprising: receiving a plurality of constraints for each of a sequence of frames, each constraint defining an ordering for at least a pair of strokes in the associated frame; creating a directed graph for each frame, each directed graph comprising a directed edge between pairs of overlapping strokes for which a constraint exists in the corresponding frame, each directed graph thereby defining a relative ordering for drawing at least some of the strokes in the corresponding frame; merging the directed graphs for the sequence of frames to form a merged directed graph; selecting a linear extension of the merged directed graph, the selecting optimizing, at least in part, the temporal coherence of the ordering of strokes for the sequence of frames; and producing a sequence of ordered lists of strokes that is usable for rendering the animation and that corresponds to the sequence of frames, according to the ordering of strokes defined by the selected linear extension.