Abstract: While 3D line drawing techniques have become well established in the past decade, most are only suitable for polygonal meshes. This paper presents splatting lines, a unified framework for generating line drawings from various types of 3D models, including point clouds, volumes, and polygonal meshes. In contrast to the existing mesh-based approaches, our method takes a densely sampled point cloud as input. It renders two diffuse shading images using splatting with different parameters and then generates line drawings by subtracting these images. Our point-based approach can be easily extended to polygonal meshes and volumes by an efficient (iso-)surface sampling method. Our method is highly efficient and it does not require any pre-computation. It is also more robust to the mesh tessellation than existing mesh-based techniques. Experimental results indicate the advantages of our method in terms of both performance and quality.