Wigglegrams or "stereographic drawings"... - mhulse/mhulse.github.io GitHub Wiki

Just so I don’t forget!

All this inspired by Dain Fagerholm!

This video was very helpful:

http://av.adobe.com/russellbrown/MeshFromGrayTurtle_SM.mov

… found on this page:

http://www.russellbrown.com/3D.html

From there, I grabbed one of Dain’s gifs:

http://dainfagerholm.blogspot.com/2012/07/threecatsandonekitten.html

Notes:

  1. Based the above, it looks like he’s using Photoshop and the “displace” filter.
  2. The displace map has to be the same size as the original art.
  3. Displace filter settings:

image03

  1. At least for the this cats gif, the trick is using 50% gray as a starting point for displace map. From there, add black to “sink” the background. The way to think about it is “shrink wrapping” the foreground elements.
  2. There should rarely be white white (or even black black)... The displace map should be kinda gray/muted. For example:

image01

image00

In fact, the displace map above has a couple of “too” bright spots around the middle cats but and paws (as seen in the final gif output I made). 6. Apply the displace map with settings above and tweak map/numbers accordingly. 7. The first frame should always be the original, unaltered, drawing. 8. Follow some of the initial steps in video above when starting out, like copying one of the channels and thinking about seperating background elements from foregrund elements (copying the red channel, for example, might be a good starting point). 9. Once you’ve got the new channel dealt with, then copy/paste it into a new file so it can be used as the map.

There’s also the possibility of using 3D tools to get this work done, but it’s kinda a pain in PS CS5 to work with depth maps.

Other notes:

  • Work in 16bits.
  • Don’t forget to open levels and even out the black/whites:

image02