Tools / Mosaic

Mosaic

Rebuild a texture as a grid of cubes, spheres or any shape you like, laid over a mesh and following its surface. Then animate it in.

Modeling Add-on Needs the base package

$2 Buy Mosaic With base package — $4

What it does

From a texture to geometry

Select a textured mesh and press Use Selection. The texture is sampled on a grid and a colored primitive is placed on the surface at each sample: a cube, sphere, plane, cylinder, or a mesh of your own.

See it before you build

A thumbnail shows the texture as the grid will sample it, a line says how many pixels and nodes a build would make, and the sample points can be drawn on the mesh in the viewport. None of that touches the scene. The build is one undo step, with a Cancel that leaves nothing behind.

Follows the mesh

Pixels ride the surface as it deforms or animates, live. Bake them into place when you are done.

Three ways to color

A shared palette of shaders, which renders anywhere and posterises as you lower the count. Exact vertex color per pixel. Or live from the texture, so the mosaic changes as you paint, swap the file or play an animated texture.

Animate it in

Scale in with an overshoot, extrude by brightness, a travelling wave, or a fade from a color. Order it by row, by column, outward from a point, at random or dark first. It is all plain keyframes, so the Graph Editor can change any of it afterwards.

Hundreds, or tens of thousands

Objects gives you a transform per pixel to pick, key and constrain, comfortable up to a few thousand. Instancer drives a particle instancer for tens of thousands. The sampling window reaches across UDIM tiles.

Honest about what it is not

This one is decorative. It fixes no workflow. It makes a good-looking thing quickly. Two limits are worth knowing. A fade is staggered per color and not per pixel, because pixels share shaders. And the Instancer is palette-only and animates per color, because Maya cannot key a single particle. Vertex color needs your renderer's vertex color node before it shows in a render.

Details

Category	Modeling
Price	$2, one payment
Requires	The base package
Maya	2024 to 2027, Windows
Install	Unzip into your Maya modules folder, restart Maya — how to install
Scene files	Builds ordinary Maya nodes and keyframes, and tags each mosaic's group so it can find it again. No script nodes, no expressions

Two dollars.

Bought once, yours to keep, updates included.

Buy Mosaic — $2 With base package — $4