The paper On Expert Performance in 3D Curve-Drawing Tasks (Schmidt, Khan, Kurtenbach & Singh, SBIM09) describes a study of 12 'expert' 3D artists. These artists performed a variety of tasks involving drawing the projections of 3D curves lying on imagined 3D surfaces. The experimental protocol involved subjects sketching on paper, using their choice of drawing instruments, with no constraints on time or drawing technique. Due to the wide variability in the resulting drawings, the results were manually digitized by the first author by tracing artist strokes using a Wacom pen-tablet display.

The Zip archive above includes the study materials (source images, PDF and MSWORD versions of the study booklet), the original 3D scenes used to create the images (Autodesk Maya ASCII format), and the 3D curves generated by projecting traces of the 2D strokes onto the 3D surfaces (Autodesk Maya ASCII format). Also included are the results of a short survey of the subjects' drawing experience.

Note that digitized 2D images are not currently included in the archive. We have so far been unable to find a scanner that accurately reproduces the faint lines found in most of the sketches. It is possible to capture this data using a DSLR camera, tripod, and careful lighting, but this is quite tedious (there are ~300 pages) and so far we have not found a willing undergraduate or intern. However, if you are actively pursuing a project in which this data would be of significant value, please contact the first author (rms@dgp.toronto.edu).