Advanced stippling
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Unfortunately, there is very little in the area of ready-to-use software packages or plugins for automatically producing stippled images. While some tutorials can be found, they largely focus on reproducing a specific style of stippled art work (e.g., Hedcut). While producing pleasing results, these techniques are not quite appropriate to TSP art: these techniques do not easily allow control over the number of stipples used. Exising software which affords control over the number of stipples employed seems to be "research grade". That is, the software's primary design goal was not that of ease of use, clarity, nor robustness. With that in mind, OS X and, maybe, Windows users as well have the option of trying out Adrian Secord's weighted Voronoi stippler [1, 2].
In the course of his researches, Adrian Secord produced a program for produce weighted Voronoi stipplings of computer image files. Secord's program allows the user to control the number of stipples used as well as their diameters. See Secord's NYU research website for informtion on downloading this program of Macs.
http://mrl.nyu.edu/~ajsecord/stipples.html
What follows are some simple notes on using this program.
- After you open an image file, it may take a bit before any stippled image appears. It sometimes helps to nudge things along by selecting "Relax Points" or "Jitter" under the "Points" menu item.
- You can control the number of stipples with the "Set num..." item under the "Points" menu.
- When you have a stippling you like, use the "Save Points" item under the "File" menu. This will write a file containing (x,y) coordinates of each point and their radii. The tspart.py script will read these files as input files. No special options need be set for tspart.py.
- If you start seeing blue stipples, that means that you're allowing more stipples than needed. You can decrease the number of allowed stipples.
Notes
[1] As sources are available for Adrian Secord's stippler, it's possible that the code can be built on Linux as well. Some very minor changes are needed to appease more recent versions of gcc. [2] On OS X, when you exit the code it tends to exit ungracefully. The author of this article has rebuilt the software on OS X 10.6 and found the issue to persist.
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