In 2011 I played around with creating a magic eye image, also called a 'Stereogram'. I ended up making two images, a front (depicting a dragon bursting through) and a back (showing the dragon's tail and body entering through the other side). For those who can't see a magic eye image, instructions are available at the official Magic Eye website.
This was a little different from the typical magic eye scenes that are depicted, which only show the texture. After examining the Harry Potter Magic Eye books, I realized you can get quite a bit of detail in the 3D image as long as the repeating image features some detail to bring it to life. So the dragon's 3D face actually has detail in its eyes, teeth, and horns.
The way I created it was by first creating a depth map. I didn't know how to use a 3D program at the time, so these were actually created by hand in photoshop. The darkest part of the image is farthest back, and the lightest is closest.
The next step was creating a texture that lent itself well to the magic eye formula:
And combining it with details of the dragon, placed where the depth map would give it dimension:
And finally uploading those composited images to a stereogram builder website which returned back the images at the top. Overall a pretty fun experiment!
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