Interactive by-example design of artistic packing layouts

Abstract

We propose an approach to "pack" a set of two-dimensional graphical primitives into a spatial layout that follows artistic goals. We formalize this process as projecting from a high-dimensional feature space into a 2D layout. Our system does not expose the control of this projection to the user in form of sliders or similar interfaces. Instead, we infer the desired layout of all primitives from interactive placement of a small subset of example primitives. To produce a pleasant distribution of primitives with spatial extend, we propose a novel generalization of Centroidal Voronoi Tesselation which equalizes the distances between boundaries of nearby primitives. Compared to previous primitive distribution approaches our GPU implementation achieves both better fidelity and asymptotically higher speed. A user study evaluates the system's usability.