One More Run at the 3-D Cosmic Whale

As I mumbled and mulled this morning, it occurred to me that there's no reason my red-green 3-D image of the four-dimensional space whale would necessarily need to start from a grayscale version of the image. If I stripped all the magenta from one side and all the cyan from another, I'd still have some vestiges of "true" color, right?



Don your 3-D glasses. Click and enlarge.

I'm not sure how successful it turns out to be, but the background planets do seem to be different colors in that version.

And now I think I can lay this experiment to rest.

Improved 3-D 4-D Space Whale!

After I posted the four-dimensional space whale last night, I realized there were several missed opportunities in my 3-D version of the drawing. Apparently I couldn't let it rest until I made another attempt.

I've also made the "ghosting" in this red-green version less aggravating, I hope.



That should be pretty fun to look at through 3-D glasses. And if you can do the "magic eye" method of relaxed-eye stereoscopy, you should be able to get more fun out of this image than out of the one in the previous post:



2-D, 3-D, 4-D! Whee!

Alphabeasts: F is for Four-Dimensional Space Whale

The winner of last week's poll was "Moby-Dick analogue," so this week's entry for Alphabeasts is "F is for Four-Dimensional Space Whale."



These aren't the only space whales out there, of course. Like, remember, O Nerd-as-a-Kid, those ones who healed Storm when she had a Brood larva in her? Too late to draw them for this alphabet. Then there's the critter that nursed itself on the engines of the Enterprise-D after Captain Picard killed its mom. And it's been ages since I read this other book, and maybe those whales were off in the distant future, not in space, but they do start with W if you want them.

Anyway, to get my faux-Kirby space whale up against my faux-Kirby background, I had to put a lot of my linework right against flat black; if you want to see the drawing itself, it's here:



I actually hadn't yet seen the Futurama episode ("Möbius Dick") that features this creature until this weekend. And I'm not sure how I feel about these latter seasons of Futurama, to tell you the truth, though it's nice to see the characters (and the cast) back in action. We don't learn a whole lot about the four-dimensional space whale in that episode, anyway, except that it feeds on obsession (not the fragrance) and only "breaches" into three-dimensional space to fill its lungs with vacuum.

(There's a pretty cool sequence starting about 11:55 into the episode where the Planet Express ship gets dragged into the fourth dimension on a "sleigh ride" behind the harpooned whale. It reminded me of an interesting old post I wrote about violations of the two-dimensional page by three-dimensional creatures.)

(Also, at 10:30 into the episode, the space whale blows out a breath in the form of a fractal, which is a nice math joke I guess.)

Anyway, all this talk about "four-dimensional this" and "three-dimensional that" made me want to work up a 3-D version of my 4-D Space Whale, so I tinkered with the method I'd used on Ben Towle's Kirby ukulele way back in the day. If you can do the "magic eye" method, you should be able to relax your eyes and see a 3-D space whale between these two images.



Or, if that method never works for you, you can whip out some 3-D glasses and try to see it here. I had trouble with the hues, though, so there's some "ghosting." Maybe that's just the four-dimensionality coming through.



UPDATE: better 3-D versions are in my next post.

Next week, I have a couple of different ideas for creatures to draw. What would you like to see me do?



You have until Friday evening to tell me.

Stereoscopic Cosmic Ukulele

I was so taken with our friend Ben Towle's Kirby-style ukulele (in turn inspired by our own post on Kirbytech) that I wanted to fiddle with the image a little bit myself.

What I've done here is turned it into another stereoscopic 3-D image. If you stare at the picture below and let your eyes relax -- or look at it as if you're looking at something farther away -- the two halves of the image should swim together to assemble a third composite image, which will be in 3-D.



Some people have an easier time seeing the small version of this image, but depending on your screen size or screen resolution, you may also be able to get the full-size image to assemble. It'll be pretty dramatic, I think. Click on it and give it a try.

You may also find it more dramatic if it looks like it's toppling towards you:



The hardest part of creating this image was getting all of the fiddly extra parts of the uke outlined with my "angle-lasso" tool, so I could cut it free from the background. If you've got any questions on how I did this, please post 'em in the comments. I'm happy to offer preliminary tips, for what they're worth.

Update: I wanted to make sure Ben could see what I'd done, so I goofed around with the "Selective Color" feature long enough to figure out how to make a proper red-green 3-D image. Ben, if you've got some spare 3-D glasses, click to enlarge this one!

An Experiment with the Third Dimension

You know what just occurred to me?

In Photoshop, I often compose images in layers. I also often nudge those layers a little to the left or to the right, to get them to line up correctly.

The difference between left-eye perspective and right-eye perspective, in three-dimensional vision, is a shifting of elements in various "layers" to the left or the right.

It should be easy, then, to use Photoshop to compose rudimentary stereoscopic images.

I'm sure this has occurred to many, many people before me, but it felt like such an interesting idea that I decided to try it out.

This is obviously a clumsy doodle, but if you click to enlarge it, then sit back from your computer screen and relax (or diverge) your eyes, as if you were looking at something more distant, you ought to get a 3-D "composite" image between the two "ghost" pictures. You may actually have an easier time getting the images to overlap if you don't click to enlarge: less overlapping work for your eyes.



Give it a try and let me know what you think. It didn't take long to make that image (less than half an hour, from doodle to post). A better one wouldn't take a whole lot longer.

If you think it works, I can try to post a "step-by-step how-to" later this week.