Escherization with Large Deformations Based on As-Rigid-As-Possible Shape Modeling

Escher tiling is well known as a tiling that consists of one or a few recognizable figures, such as animals. The Escherization problem involves finding the most similar shape to a given goal figure that can tile the plane. However, it is easy to imagine that there is no similar tile shape for complex goal shapes. This article devises a method for finding a satisfactory tile shape in such a situation. To obtain a satisfactory tile shape, the tile shape is generated by deforming the goal shape to a considerable extent while retaining the characteristics of the original shape. To achieve this, both goal and tile shapes are represented as triangular meshes to consider not only the contours but also the internal similarity of the shapes. To measure the naturalness of the deformation, energy functions based on traditional as-rigid-as-possible shape modeling are incorporated into a recently developed framework of the exhaustive search of the templates for the Escherization problem. The developed algorithms find satisfactory tile shapes with natural deformations for fairly complex goal shapes.