I’ve been playing with stipple rendering, borrowing some ideas from Adrian Secord. Here’s a still photo I processed with the technique, which resembles stipple portraiture.

I noticed, when reading Adrian’s very cool paper, that the Centroidal Voronoi diagrams he describes produce essentially the same pattern as the repulsion field algorithm I created a few years ago for my Coverpop website. While the patterns are essentially identical (producing a kind of blue noise), my algorithm is more efficient since it doesn’t need to do k-means clustering on every pixel.

My algorithm is a bit more like the avoidance part of Craig Reynold’s flocking algorithm — it just operates on the centroids, which repel each other. I thought it might be suitable for using with a live webcam feed.

This is my first test with a webcam. The video is running at a faster frame rate than I’m actually able to achieve on my laptop, but I think I should be able to crank it up a bit with some work.

Here’s a second test, this time using bigger pixels, and scissors.

Download the sketch (video version)
Download the sketch (still image version)