Animosaics

Abstract

Animated mosaics are a traditional form of stop-motion animation created by arranging and rearranging small objects or tiles from frame to frame. While this animation style is uniquely compelling, the traditional process of manually placing and then moving tiles in each frame is time-consuming and labourious. Recent work has proposed algorithms for static mosaics, but generating temporally coherent mosaic animations has remained open. In addition, previous techniques for temporal coherence allow non-photorealistic primitives to layer, blend, deform, or scale, techniques that are unsuitable for mosaic animations. This paper presents a new approach to temporal coherence and applies this to build a method for creating mosaic animations. Specifically, we characterize temporal coherence as the coordinated movement of groups of primitives. We describe a system for achieving this coordinated movement to create temporally coherent geometric packings of 2D shapes over time. We also show how to create static mosaics comprised of different tile shapes using area-based centroidal Voronoi diagrams