Turning real-life photos into low-poly images
Low-poly backgrounds, when done right, look pretty cool. I built a
tool to make them a couple years back, but I was dissatisfied because all
the simple designs (geometric backgrounds, colored triangles, etc.) seemed
a bit boring, and it was exceedingly hard to recreate real-life scenes with
the tool I had built.
Throughout college I amassed a library of photos I had taken, and it
seemed like the right time to build something that could give them a
low-poly style. This new tool lets you put in a picture and pick the
vertices of your triangles, and then it generates a low-poly cover of the
image that you can flatten onto the image with your favorite photo editor.
It does a Delaunay Triangulation on those vertices, and each triangle's
color is set to be the color of the pixel at the centroid (center of mass)
of the triangle.
For the picture up top, I used the tool on a photo of a brown spotted
jellyfish at the Monterey Bay Aquarium. If you look close, you can see that I've done a pretty sloppy job
near the ends of the jelly's tentacles. It's covered up by the dock on my phone
so I've left it as it is. Eventually I'll give the tool a little more visual polish, and one of my
goals is to automate point selection based off of colors and edges, but for
now, here it is:
Make your own low-poly image!