"Ben T. Scheele" <sch### [at] tcumnedu> wrote in message
news:3e18e1e6@news.povray.org...
>     That's cool.  How are those kinds of images different from the kind
> you'd see in those stereo-opticon devices from a while back?
>     Also, I found a program that allows you to create magic eye type
images
> if you have a texture file and a 3D image rendered as a depth map.  Does
> anyone know how to render a scene that way?  I attached a sample of the
> input and output.  The program is called Sisgen.

The difference is probably in just that the effect is done by repetition of
an identical object which is shifted a little from each other. In the case
of the cubes they are rotated, a lone pair of them would be like a
stereo-optic photo.

You can see a somewhat 3D plus 2D effect in any repeated pattern, such as
wallpaper, without there being any shifts.

The way you'd do a depth map in POV-Ray 3.5 is by applying a universal
pigment gradient to the scene objects that goes from rgb 1 to rgb 0 with
only ambient 1 finish and no light sources. The orientation being aligned
with the camera. It has been done before. In fact, MegaPOV 0.7 has a feature
to make it a little easier except you still need to know the nearest and
farthest points of the scene objects. In 3.5 there is min_extent and
max_extent to find a measure of a unioned scene by extracting one of the
axes, unfortunately it isn't accurate for complex objects and you'd still
have to do some orientation to the camera.

Rune Johannsen has a tutorial on this
http://runevision.com/graphics/stereo/depthmap/depthmap.asp

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