Pantograph Deformed Photo Mosaic Tilings

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Pantograph Deformed Photo Mosaic Tilings

The following is a photo mosaic image created using a movie brush in the paint synthesizer. In a previous post here we described how to build a black and white pantograph effect. This post will discuss how to fill the white interior cells of a black and white pantograph image with photo mosaic blocks. This effect creates a nice organic tiling effect, where the tiles ebb and flow with the source features of the image as opposed to being laid out in a regular grid.

The effect shown below requires a 2-dimensional black and white grid to be defined by the pantograph effect. There are several of these available in the Pantograph Etching PASeq preset category. All of these PASeq presets require 2 layers. I picked the SimpleLumPanto1C PASeq preset to work with, as shown below.

As mentioned before, these PASeq presets require 2 layers to work properly. A smoothed black and white relief image is built in layer 1. Layer 2 is then set to white, and then 2 passes of an AutoPaint preset are used to paint a series of relief modulated horizontal and vertical black lines on the white background. So you end up with a relief modulated black grid pattern painted on top of a white canvas.

The 2nd gallery image shows how the Path Start Generator is setup to generate a series of horizontal lines that scan completely across the canvas. You would reverse the horizontal and vertical grid spacing to generate the second perpendicular line scan that works with the first to build the modulated grid patterning. The large scan spacing needs to be bigger than the dimension of the overall canvas in order for this trick to work.

The 3rd gallery image above shows how Bus1 modulator is being used to modulate the orientation displacement of the path randomization offset. The 4th gallery image shows that the Bus1 modulator is set to layer 1, which is the hidden layer where the relief image is being build up. The 5th gallery image shows that the Interpolate Path control in the Path Application control panel is turned on so that a continuous path is drawn. Otherwise the path randomization processing would generate discontinuities in the randomized path, and we want the displaced path to be smooth and continuous as it draws across the entire canvas axis.

The 6th gallery image above shows the finished pantograph effect. Here’s a link to the wikipedia entry that describes a pantograph if you are curious about the ancient drawing device we are trying to simulate in this PASeq preset. The spacing of the grid generated by the original PASeq preset is a little too small for optimal use in building a photo mosaic effect based on the relief modulated grid. To increase the size of the grid, we need to adjust the Path Start control panel Grid Spacing, as shown in the first gallery image below. Note that only the smaller of the 2 Grid directions is increased, since the longer spacing is designed to force the rest of the border scan to take place off canvas. This is an edit of the first AutoPaint action step in the PASeq.

After hand editing the first AutoPaint action step, you then option click the associated red keyframe at frame time 1 for that action step in the PASeq (as shown in the 2nd gallery image above). The second AutoPaint action step is then similarly edited (as shown in the 3rd gallery image above). That editing change is then recorded into the existing PASeq by option clicking the red keyframe at frame time 1 for this second AutoPaint action step (as shown in the 4th gallery image above). The edited pantograph relief modulated grid now looks like the 5th gallery image above. Note that the spacing between the grid cells is now much larger, associated with the 2 hand edits we made to the individual auto paint action steps.

Now the main point of this post was to use the white grid regions as regions to fill in with movie brush paint nibs to build a modulated grid photo mosaic image. So, I started out by selecting on of the brick wall photo mosaic paint presets we’ve discussed here before. The brickMovieBrushPreset paint preset (available for download from the link above) generates the photos mosaic effect shown below.

The adaptive block positioning is based on the Adaptive Block Regionize setting for the Generator parameter in the Path Start control panel (2nd gallery image above).

However, we want to fill in the white grid spaces associated with the relief modulated pantograph grid we generated with our original PASeq above. The edited larger grid pantograph we generated in the discussion above is shown below.

The trick I used to fill in the white spaces with movie brush nibs that fill the different shaped white interior grid regions is as follows. I started by setting the selection to the pantograph canvas image. I did this by using the Canvas : Selection : Set to : Canvas menu command ( as shown in the 2nd gallery image above). I then changed the Path Start Generator parameter setting to Selection as Regions – Full On Only ( as shown in the 3rd gallery image above). Running the edited brick wall movie brush photo mosaic paint preset now fills in the white interior regions of our pantograph image as shown in the 4th gallery image above.

At this point you probably want to rerun the the original AutoPaint action steps for the pantograph PASeq with slightly increased maximum brush size to redraw the black grid lines.

The procedure described in this post is what I used to create the original photo mosaic image shown at the top of the post. I was using a modified yantra movie brush as the movie brush to fill the relief modulated white grid spaces in the example image at the top of the post.

The general idea described in this post can be used for more than just photo mosaic effects based on movie brushes. It also can be used to generate really nice tiling paint effects that look like they were made from hand laid solid colored tiles. Here’s an example of a similar approach from one of my posts on the Studio Artist User Forum.

Pantograph Deformed Photo Mosaic Tilings

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