Mosaica was written because the PhotoShop and PaintShopPro implementations of this simple filter are a bit
lacking when it comes to creating mosaics for 3D environments.
It's similar to mosaic functions you've seen elsewhere but has a few more features that make it pretty nice. For starters,
it creates a matching bump map so you can synchronize the image and bump map in your 3D app.
It has the typical tile size, mortar spacing, and mortar
color parameters but that's where the similarities end.
It also lets you randomly tweak the brightness because
all mosaics have slight color variations. You can choose random rotations to make it look like tiles are breaking
free. Noise adds more variation to individual tiles and you can set how often a tile is missing.
Here's an image that was plugged into Mosaica.
And here's the
rendered result. Notice the color variations, random rotations, missing tiles, and the matching bump map!
If DaVinci were alive today, he'd say, "What's a bump map?"
