Packing tiles for mosaics

[KarlRichter]

A while ago, I was working on a project that had lots of animated tiles. It is actually quite a tricky problem to pack a bunch of shapes together with the smallest amount of "grout". While researching this, I stumbled across this paper "Simulating Decorative Mosaics" by Alejo Hausner, and thought this would be a perfect thing to implement in Houdini!

Here is the input, the houdini logo:

Also needed are curves that represent the color or element boundaries:

Here is one iteration of the loop. This is basically the result you would get copying tiles using a scatter and copy sop:

After running the loop for fifty iterations, the tiles seem to be pretty well packed, and are respecting the boundary curves very well:

And lastly, here is a version with randomized tile sizes. Still works pretty well!

While I never actually ended up using this in production, But I thought it was pretty cool and could be used for other stuff, like maybe packing houses in a procedurally generated map or something.

Anyway, here is an example .hip file if anyone wants to play around with it:

mosaics_example.hip

 

[flcc]

Really cool set-up.
Too bad you didn't post it two months ago.