Programmable Synthesis of Element Textures and Application to Cartography. (Synthèse programmable de textures à base d'éléments et application à la cartographie)

This thesis introduces a programmable method to design 2D arrangements for element textures: Textures made of small geometric elements. These textures are ubiquitous in numerous applications of computer-aided illustration. Our approach targets technical artists who will design an arrangement by writing a script. Such scripts are based on three types of operators dedicated to the fast creation of stationary arrangements:Partitioning operators for defining the broad-scale organization of the arrangement, mapping operators for controlling the local organization of elements, and merging operators for mixing different arrangements. We show that this simple set of operators is sufficient to reach a much broader variety of arrangements than previous methods. Editing the script leads to predictable changes in the synthesized arrangement, which allows an easy iterative design of complex structures. Finally, our operator set is extensible and can be adapted to application-dependent needs. In particular, we introduce an additional contribution to this main framework: We present a method that demonstrates interactive performances at synthesizing (infinite) regular and semi-regular arrangements using the Tiled Planar Map, a novel data structure that contains few yet sufficient information for representing these arrangements. Finally, we show how to extend our system for designing spatially-varying textures using control fields. In particular, we present a practical application to cartography in which we collaborated with the French National Mapping Agency (IGNFrance) to automatically synthesize hatchings in rocky mountain areas of topographic maps.