Lenticular images

#1

Recently, I looked at http://www.grand-illusions.com /lifetile.htm article about lenticular images and saw the amazing stuff you can achieve with this technique.
Has anyone here in CGtalk tried making the actual lenticular animation, and if so what are your experiences with that?
That thing is magic!

P.S. I think the process itself could be very useful as a presentation for 3d artists, because you can actually represent the model or a scene in a very effective way - completely three dimensional.

#2

That is cool, I’d love to try & make these things, they look expensive though??

#3

Well, the whole process can be done at home, using only a desktop printer and some of the interlacing programs (since the lenticular image consists of multiple interlaced images). The only thing that is expensive are the lenses - “ribbed plastics” that cover the image and “do the trick”. Although, when you buy more - you pay less per piece. The only trouble (for me) is that it can only be bought in US as I have found out so far, so with the shipment costs, it doesn’t really pay out to “play” with it…

#4

I actually worked for a small company doing lenticular images when I first got out of college in 99. It’s a very very tedious and I mean tedious process. We were using software that was written for our company. We mostly took 2d images and in photoshop would create layers that would be the “depth”. Of course you would have to go back and rubber stamp behind the layers since they would be shifting over in the image and would reveal what was behind them (in this case nothing since they were 2d images, hence the rubber stamping needs). Once the layers were created we would use our plugin to setup the amount of pixels the layers would shift and then preview it so get an idea for how the final lenticular would work. Once we were happy with the preview, we would render (There was some math here to figure out the ideal viewing distance from the image and also the LPI of the lens (amount of Lenticules) out the final image and then laminate it to the lens (This is the hardest part, registration is absolutely key). All in all, it was very tedious and quite expensive process. The lens is not cheap. We were working very large (images from 24x36 to 4feet by 12feet).

For Animation, that was easier in terms of the file prep, we would just take the frames of animation and create a photoshop file with the frames as layers and feed that into our tool. The Lens’s LPI would determine the amount of frames we could have.

Hope this is of help.

#5

There used to be a company (3dhardcopy) that could make 3d lenticular images of your computer graphics for a low price (about $40.00), but they seem to have disappeared.

You would provide them with a series of images of your 3d scene or model, with the model rotated slightly for each image and they could do a lenticular printout for you.

I’ve looked around since then for a similar service but couldn’t find any. Just ones that do large runs for advertising purposes. Anyone know of any?

Also, it would be nice if some of the companies that produced lenticular sheets could produce “flys-eye” sheets so you could do lenticular images with full parallax instead of just left-right parallax (like this: http://www.lenstar.org/history/ch2.htm).

#6

What would be really cool would be a lenticular adapter for the Playstation portable! And games to suit it, of course!

#7

I’ve always thought this would be a great format for a CG artist’s business card or even better their demo reel. I’m guessing that your reel wouldn’t get tossed out before being watched if it’s cover was done as a lenticular image.

#8

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