Abstract
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. In this work, we conduct research on two applications of Pixel art. In the first part, we present a novel computational framework to automatically construct brick sculptures from pixel art. LEGO®, a popular brick-based toy construction system, provides an affordable and convenient way of fabricating geometric shapes. 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. In this work, we implement a set of design guidelines concerning the visual quality as well as the structural stability of built sculptures. In the second part, we present a novel animation framework tailored to pixel art images. 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. Existing systems typically request users to craft individual pixels frame by frame, which is a tedious and error-prone process. Our system bases on conventional keyframe 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.