Texture support is one major improvement in Mathematica 8.0. Sure, we can have some fun with it. Here is an example. We draw some polygons first.
Then some textures are applied, we get the following image. The main trick is to use alpha channel to get this cut-out texture mapping effect. The original tree image has the alpha channel already, we can use it directly, Texture[ImageData[tree]] will do the trick, if you use Texture[tree], somehow it will not pick up the alpha channel. For the character image, it doesn’t has the alpha channel, we can set a alpha channel by the following command:
SetAlphaChannel[im,
ChanVeseBinarize[ColorNegate@im] // FillingTransform ]
By the way, the character is Tom Nook: "This isn't fat, I've just lined my insides with money."
