Stereogram maker

Step 1. Import depth map image

Tips and help

This should be a black and white image, where the brightness of each pixel represents how far away that point is from the viewer. You can use a picture where black pixels are near and white ones are far away, or a picture where white pixels are near and black ones are far away, but you can't just use a black and white photo because the shadows will look further away than the highlights.

You can get pictures like this with a custom shader, or by rendering in a game engine with bright white ambient light and black distance fog, or even just by drawing them — they don't have to be perfect to sell the illusion. For an example, check the "depth" image on this website.

Step 2. Import or create pattern image

Tips and help

This is the image that will repeat across the final picture. It should be the same height as your scene image, and generally about a quarter to a tenth of the width, depending on what settings you plan to use later.

If you leave it blank, we can generate a noise pattern, which works pretty well. Otherwise you can import a custom image. Bear in mind that the image needs to have lots of fine detail so that your eye can pick out precisely where the repeating patterns are — if it doesn't have this, turn the noise on and we can add some noise to act as fine detail. Set the noise to about 0.5 to get enough noise to work without overwhelming the image.

You can also use any small image by tiling it vertically as well as horizontally — to do so use the "repeat image" checkbox.

Output

Tips and help

If you're having trouble seeing the image there are a few things you can do.

After you get used to doing it it gets much easier.

By Andrew