procedural art - What is this kind of pattern called and how is it created?

I've seen quite alot of these the best way to make a pattern like this I found was to make a blurry image with a buch of colors (similarly to this image blurred @50px or so) get that into illustrator, have your pattern in a live paint group in illustrator and then just toggle between the eyedropper and the live paint bucket clicking on every cell with the image being in the background of the pattern that has transparent cells untill filled.

Are there any better ways to do this?

Answer

In Photoshop

1. Duplicate layer run filter → Pixelate → Mosaic.... Mask with half of the triangles


2. Offset other layer, mosaic and move to background.

Image 1: Quick demo of method above. You can also try three or more layers with different shapes.

If you really want the even sided triangle you need to scale the mosaic tiles down in height a bit.

In Illustrator

You can also do this in Illustrator If you wish prepare the 2 images in PS like above. Save and import them into illustrator.

1. Object → Create Object Mosaic... (optional if you want to get rid of image.)



2. Create the objects to mask.


3. duplicate the mask objects and apply them as a clipping mask. (or intersect divide etc)


4. repeat on layer 2...

Image 2: Variation on the theme.

Tweak to your hearts content.

Doing a equal sided triangles

Since somebody asked for this specifically. The same method can be used for equal sided triangles in Illustrator, and photoshop Described by @TalisanCreations. The change is just have to use a non square starting point. This can be achieved in multiple ways.