Pack Sprites Filter in G’MIC
Long story short I was looking into ways to pack lots of images into a bigger shape without it taking ages with manual methods (although that gives you the most control).
There are experimental ways to do this with 2D physics engines. One was being worked on a few years ago which Adobe might be developing (but I can’t say for sure).
There is a game engine called Box2D for 2D physics here which may be of interest to people looking into this. It is implemented in a new 2D motion design app called Cavalry.
If you are familiar with 2D physics and game engines you could create an interactive way to do this sort of thing for Illustration or design purposes (Look up softbody physics and 2D colliders), but until someone makes something like that available in a graphics program or designed for general art use there is a filter in G’MIC that may help. This solution does not use a 2D physics engine, but it packs sprites together getting the desired effect.
After following the above tutorial using Krita and G’MIC with some of my own turtle images I made this design:
Heads up I wanted to try it using Affinity Photo and the G’MIC plugin but this particular filter did not work in that program. Krita works and I assume Gimp would support it as well because the YouTube tutorial uses Gimp and G’MIC.
Give it a go!