Assignment 22: Lenticular

In this post, I will outline my journey towards making my final lenticular animation.

I was originally thinking about telling the story of some worker going around, climbing ladders, etc, but thought that would be too complicated. I then thought I would give my personal ray tracer a spin and make an animation with some nifty spheres traveling around on top of a plane.

I decided that this was not very suitable for the 10-frame format of the lenticular print, because although I liked it and it was simple enough, it did not have enough temporal coherence. I then envisioned a discrete path in space. I tried to envision how to define the path, but the best I did was create a spiral pattern as follows:

I decided that this animation required too many frames to realize my creative vision, but my friend reminded me that the path that I envisioned was called Hilbert’s Curve. From this I was able to solve and implement an animation along the path of this fractal curve.

I then decided to try out moving spheres instead.

It still needed a bit of work and after several iterations, I finally produced one that I am reasonably happy with.

I believe that I achieved everything that I wanted to with this design. I was able to visualize a mathematical path in a concise way and was able to make a movement that is at first glance repetitious, but after further viewing displays quite a bit of unique character.

More Information.

Please see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilbert_curve. Also note that I have donated a copy of this animation to the creative commons and it should be visible on the Wikipedia page.

Code

You can view the code for my Assignment here:
https://github.com/Bryce-Summers/IACD_Lenticular/