Mosaic image effect using Voronoi diagrams

I’m currently working on a game called Ludus where you play as the head of a gladiator school.
One of the effects I needed to do for the gameplay was a procedural ‘mosaic’ effect representing an image from one of the gladiatorial fights. The effect was kinda interesting and I did a small write up of the effect here:



Nice effect! I was going to ask how you analyzed image complexity so that the characters had more detail, but you already answered that in that you didn’t! There are only two levels of detail. Did you try reducing the palette to say 64 colors so that you end up with a stronger quantized appearance?

You could also turn the Voronoi edges into a bump/normal map and a specular mask so that the tiles pop when the texture is lit by directional lighting. Also, you could come up with different areas of “grout” colors and staining/detail/scratches on some of the “tiles”.

Hi btribble. Those are some excellent suggestions, thank you!
You’re right about the complexity calculation which could be much more sophisticated, perhaps analyzing the amount of rgb change in the area instead of just the alpha value to score the pixel higher for a voronoi point. I did this when making the terrain meshes so it should be easy to bring the code over, I just hadn’t thought about it when making the mosaic effect so thanks for bringing it up.
Interesting also about reducing the palette, I had not thought of that at all but it makes perfect sense.
Cheers for the input!