I've always wanted a smarter mosaic previewer.  Here are some ideas.

* Instead of walking pixels/tiles in left-to-right-top-to-bottom order,
  consider letting the renderer have a queue of higher priority pixels/tiles
  which are rendered immediately in the order they're added to the queue.
  Whenever the queue is empty, it should behave as it currently does.
  It should still avoid calculating any pixel more than once, of course.

* Wherever a pixel or tile is very different from its neighbors' colors,
  say, a red tile found amid several mostly white tiles, recurse an extra
  level in that region to give the viewer a little more definition along
  the natural edges of the image.

* Wherever the user clicks in the preview window, enqueue a few more pixels
  to be rendered on a priority basis in that area.  I suggest enqueueing a
  random spray in a circle of a few pixels around the mouse click.  This
  will let the user "paint" an area to be previewed first, extremely
  helpful to check if a part has just the right angle or material, before
  the render goes ahead and fills out the sky and other areas.

Again, if the queue is empty, the renderer should continue as it does today,
churning out the mosaic tiles or individual pixels that are unrendered in
row-wise fashion.

Post a reply to this message