Pixelated Abstraction Advisor: Andrew Nealen

Pixel art remains a contemporary art form and a common rendering technique in digital games and media. However, the manual creation of pixel art is often time consuming and requires a degree of skill that is not easily obtained by novices of the art. In my thesis I present my work on automatically and semi-automatically converting high resolution images into an output that approximates the manual results of pixel artists. This is a multi-step, iterative algorithm that simultaneously solves for a palette and a mapping of segments of the input image to pixels in the output. The proposed tools gives the user flexible influence on the output and the ability to work anywhere between a purely automated and purely manual process.

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