Amazing New Discovery the Second: Wiggle gifs

[DMagic]

I was trying to figure out a good way to visualize 3D images while looking at some of the pictures from this preliminary Oculus Rift thread when I remembered wiggle gifs. These are fairly simple in concept, you take two or three images from slightly different angles, align them and make a short, repeating gif. The resulting image can give you a pretty good sense of depth.

I tried this out with a few recent creations of mine. The best result came from, not surprisingly, the most time-consuming and painstaking method. For this image I cut out the craft from the second frame and overlaid it on the first frame. I used the clone stamp tool to cover up the exposed edges of the craft from the original frame. The fixed background really makes the craft stand out, I think.

You can compare this to another example with a moving background. It works ok, but it’s not as good as the first image. This one uses three images (which comes out to four frames in the final gif), this tends to give better results.

Making gifs for larger constructions is a bit trickier. For this base I can’t cut out the craft because it’s attached to the ground, trying to separate the base from the ground would just look strange. I also need to be more careful about aligning the frames, it’s important to keep one central element in a fixed position in every frame, even a small change can ruin the effect. Having the craft take up such a large part of the screen also causes issues, the edges of the craft can be a little distracting because they move so much.

Sometimes you get a little of that popup book effect, where everything looks strangely flat. You can also see how using only two frames can make things look a little too shaky.

And sometimes I can’t really get it to work. This image seems like it should be easy to create some depth, but it doesn’t seem to come out very well.

This is the image from the Oculus Rift thread by localSol. I had to align the two images using that thing on the left wing, but I think it works pretty well.

Ok maybe this is too much trouble to rise to the level of an amazing discovery, but it is at least a notable discovery.

[RocketPilot573]

Wow! The pictures seem so much more... alive...

[TheCanadianVendingMachine]

Wow, good job. It really looks 3d

Edit: What would happen if you speed up the gifs? By a lot, I mean.

Edited December 8, 2013 by TheCanadianVendingMachine

[DMagic]

Wow, good job. It really looks 3d

Edit: What would happen if you speed up the gifs? By a lot, I mean.

I set them at 0.1 sec delay per frame in photoshop, you can put them at 0.0 sec but it doesn't seem to make a difference for the end result. Within photoshop I can see a difference, and for some of them it is an improvement (the base pictures don't look as good though, the large movements between frames gets more distracting at faster transition speeds). But the gif save preview in photoshop is even faster, the screen starts to look warped if you look at it long enough, it's very strange and definitely too fast. Once they are saved I can't see a difference though, the gif playback seems to be dependent on the viewing software, there seems to be some minimum transition speed that makes faster transitions not work (they can be slowed down though). I'll see if I can find a way around that.

[DMagic]

I managed to get some images with faster transition times, but apparently browsers are stupid and cut off the minimum transition time. They all do it differently, but on Chrome these work fine for me.

It works a little better, but any faster than this and things start to look a little weird.

I think to really get a really good effect I need a version with three or four frames set at a higher speed.

I also found that the pictures of larger objects don't work so well, speeding up the transition time just makes the edges more noticeable. This one isn't too bad though, and the faster transition looks a little better.

[WhiteRaven22]

It's a cool concept, but it reminds me too much of the wobble that space craft do when they are about to fall apart in the atmosphere.

[Dizzle]

...and now I want to play in 3D.

[The Destroyer]

Just a few hours ago I watched a video of EXACTLY this.