This paper presents an automatic non-photorealistic rendering approach to generating technical illustration from 3D models. It first decomposes the 3D object into a set of C SG primitives, and then performs the hidden surface removal based on the prioritized list, in which the rendition order of CSG primitives is sorted out by depth. Then, each primitive is illustrated by the pre-defined empirical lighting model, and the system mimics the stroke-drawing by user-specified style. In order to artistically and flexibly modulate the illumination, the empirical lighting model is defined by three major components: parameters & multi-level lighting intensities, parametric spatial occupations for each lighting level, and an interpolation method to calculate the lighting distribution over primitives. The stylized illustration is simulated by a grid-based method, in which we "fill" the desirable pictorial units into the spatial occupation of CSG primitives, instead of "pixel-by-pixel" painting. This region-by-region shading facilitates the simulation of illustration styles.