David Kuo
Game & Graphics Programmer
Publications
Game & Graphics Programmer
Ming-Hsun Kuo , Yongliang Yang , Hung-Kuo Chu
Pacific Graphics 2016 , Computer Graphics Forum
Pixel art is a modern digital art in which high resolution images are abstracted into low resolution pixelated outputs using concise outlines and reduced color palettes. Creating pixel art is a labor intensive and skill-demanding process due to the challenge of using limited pixels to represent complicated shapes. Not surprisingly, generating pixel art animation is even harder given the additional constraints imposed in the temporal domain. Although many powerful editors have been designed to facilitate the creation of still pixel art images, the extension to pixel art animation remains an unexplored direction. Existing systems typically request users to craft individual pixels frame by frame, which is a tedious and error-prone process. In this work, we present a novel animation framework tailored to pixel art images. Our system bases on conventional key-frame animation framework and state-of-the-art image warping techniques to generate an initial animation sequence. The system then jointly optimizes the prominent feature lines of individual frames respecting three metrics that capture the quality of the animation sequence in both spatial and temporal domains. We demonstrate our system by generating visually pleasing animations on a variety of pixel art images, which would otherwise be difficult by applying state-of-the-art techniques due to severe artifacts.
Ming-Hsun Kuo , You-En Lin , Hung-Kuo Chu , Ruen-Rone Lee , Yongliang Yang
Pacific Graphics 2015 , Computer Graphics Forum
LEGO, a popular brick-based toy construction system, provides an affordable and convenient way of fabricating geometric shapes. However, building arbitrary shapes using LEGO bricks with restrictive colors and sizes is not trivial. It requires careful design process to produce appealing, stable and constructable brick sculptures. In this work, we investigate the novel problem of constructing brick sculptures from pixel art images. In contrast to previous efforts that focus on 3D models, pixel art contains rich visual contents for generating engaging LEGO designs. On the other hand, the characteristics of pixel art and corresponding brick sculpture pose new challenges to the design process. We propose a novel computational framework to automatically construct brick sculptures from pixel arts. This is based on implementing a set of design guidelines concerning the visual quality as well as the structural stability of built sculptures. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework with various bricks sculptures (both real and virtual) generated from a variety of pixel art images. Experimental results show that our system is efficient and gains significant improvements over state-of-the-arts.