As someone with an arts degree (not in painting though, but still) it feels really really weird to see how that animation builds up the image. It feels less random than the old "simulated annealing with vector shapes" techniques, ending up somewhere that feels both similar and extremely far removed from how a human would do it at the same.

It's like… the way a trained human would paint feels kind of like how MSB radix sort makes an array look more ordered, going from crude to refined. The way your algorithm builds up an i|age feels like I'm looking at a radix sort that alternates between a stable MSB and LSB radix sort, which is weird as heck. It's fascinating, really.

Neat, watching it paint as an animation is pretty fun.

It was more of a stylistic choice on my part. I could add more layers to flesh out background details. And it's Hong Kong actually. :)

I used my own photos for the input, I find images with the subject isolated to be more visually pleasing, hence most of my photos are in this style. But there wouldn't be any difference to the algorithm if the image was full of detail as you can see with my photo of Hong Kong at the end.

From the article

> In the days of generative image models, it's still fun to see what can be achieved using traditional image transformation techniques.

> But the really fun part of the project was in combining a number of techniques, such as Perlin noise, wavelets, and edge detection, that I played around with previously in isolation. All these different tricks came together for this project, making it possible to build something greater than the sum of its parts. I find these are the most rewarding types of experiments where you can build on things you've previously learned and combine them in novel ways to make something new and unexpected. I hope you enjoyed the journey as much as I did working on the project.

You can already use genAI to do similar things. The whole point, however, was to see what I could do using traditional techniques. The other benefit is that it's something you can run locally without needing a lot of resources, and have full control over the shape of the output. You can also combine this with generative models, and have a model generate a picture, then have this repaint it. Ultimately the point was to have some fun and play around with combining these techniques.

Glad you liked it!

Thanks, it was a really fun thread to pull on. :)