Editing Non-photorealistic rendering (section)

==History and criticism of the term==
The term ''non-photorealistic rendering'' is believed to have been coined by the [[SIGGRAPH]] 1990 papers committee, who held a session entitled "Non Photo Realistic Rendering".<ref>{{cite book |doi=10.1145/97879 |title=Proceedings of the 17th annual conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques - SIGGRAPH '90 |year=1990 |isbn=978-0-201-50933-5 |s2cid=12199502 |last1=Baskett |first1=Forest }}{{pn|date=July 2022}}</ref><ref>{{cite thesis |last1=Schofield |first1=Simon |title=Non-photorealistic rendering: a critical examination and proposed system |date=March 1994 |url=https://eprints.mdx.ac.uk/6723/ }}</ref>

The term has received some criticism: 
* The term "[[photorealism]]" has different meanings for graphics researchers (see "[[photorealistic rendering]]") and artists.  For artists—who are the target consumers of NPR techniques—it refers to a school of painting that focuses on reproducing the effect of a [[camera lens]], with all the distortion and hyper-reflections{{Definition needed|date=May 2019}} that it creates. For graphics researchers, however, it refers to an image that is visually indistinguishable from reality.  In fact, graphics researchers lump the kinds of visual distortions that are used by photorealist painters into "non-photorealism".
* Describing something by what it is ''not'' is problematic. Equivalent (made-up) comparisons might be "non-elephant biology" or "non-geometric mathematics". NPR researchers have stated that they expect the term will disappear eventually and be replaced by the now more general term "computer graphics", with "photorealistic graphics" being the term used to describe "traditional" computer graphics.{{citation needed|date=March 2014}}
* Many techniques that are used to create 'non-photorealistic' images are not [[Rendering (computer graphics)|rendering]] techniques. They are modelling techniques, or post-processing techniques.  While the latter are coming to be known as 'image-based rendering', sketch-based modelling techniques, cannot technically be included under this heading, which is very inconvenient for conference organisers.

The first conference on non-photorealistic animation and rendering{{when|date=June 2020}} included a discussion of possible alternative names. Among those suggested were "expressive graphics", "artistic rendering", "non-realistic graphics", "art-based rendering", and "psychographics". All of these terms have been used in various research papers on the topic, but the "non-photorealistic" term seems to have nonetheless taken hold.

The first technical meeting dedicated to NPR was the [[Association for Computing Machinery|ACM]]-sponsored Symposium on Non-Photorealistic Rendering and Animation<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.npar.org|title=npar|website=www.npar.org|access-date=20 April 2018|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20020330144834/http://npar.org/ |archive-date=30 March 2002 |url-status=usurped}}</ref>(NPAR) in 2000.  NPAR is traditionally co-located with the Annecy Animated Film Festival,<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.annecy.org|title=Site officiel du Festival et du Marché international du film d'animation d'Annecy|website=www.annecy.org|access-date=20 April 2018}}</ref> running on even numbered years. From 2007 onward, NPAR began to also run on odd-numbered years, co-located with ACM [[SIGGRAPH]].<ref>{{cite web |url=http://siggraph.org/ |title=Archived copy |website=siggraph.org |access-date=13 January 2022 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/19961221040900/http://siggraph.org/ |archive-date=21 December 1996 |url-status=dead}}</ref>