pEt: Direct Manipulation of Differentiable Vector Patterns

Abstract

Procedural assets are used in computer graphics applications since variations can be obtained by changing the parameters of the procedural programs. As the number of parameters increases, editing becomes cumbersome as users have to manually navigate a large space of choices. Many methods in the literature have been proposed to estimate parameters from example images, which works well for initial starting points. For precise edits, inverse manipulation approaches let users manipulate the output asset interactively, while the system determines the procedural parameters. In this work, we focus on editing procedural vector patterns, which are collections of vector primitives generated by procedural programs. Recent work has shown how to estimate procedural parameters from example images and sketches, that we complement here by proposing a method for direct manipulation. In our work, users select and interactively transform a set of shape points, while also constraining other selected points. Our method then optimizes for the best pattern parameters using gradient-based optimization of the differentiable procedural functions. We support edits on large variety of patterns with different shapes, symmetries, continuous and discrete parameters, and with or without occlusions.