Just realized that I hadn't posted this here, and I was also reading the old post about Blender that got bumped so here I am!

I had been playing with creating these "2.5D" videos from still images as part of a larger thing I'm working on. Recently there were a couple of posts in the photo community showing off the results of a guy who does it with Adobe After Effects. So I made this to show off the results of doing it entirely with F/OSS.

First, here's the example video:


By way of a slight explanation, I had also created this to show what was going on with the planes:



I was asked to write a full tutorial for doing this, so if anyone wanted to play with Blender a little bit (and do some tedious masking in GIMP), here's the full tutorial on how to create the effect:

2.5D Parallax Animated Photo Tutorial (using Free Software)

In a nutshell? Consider static image in terms of depth planes. Mask as layers in GIMP. Export each layer as image. Import each image as a plane in Blender. Stack and offset to produce parallax when animating camera.

Yes, I had seen and followed that tutorial quite some time ago in an attempt to do some camera mapping of more complex scenes (flying in and through a photograph similar to the tut). It's an amazing tutorial and quite fun!

Technically this isn't really "camera mapping" per se, I think. When I hear camera mapping I'm usually thinking of building geometric 3D solids to project image textures onto the UV of those objects per the view I'm in (hence "camera" mapping). Though this is similar, I think this came about mostly due to the limitations the adobe users had in not having a full 3D system on hand (ie: they had photoshop and after effects, then just hacked away at after effects to get this effect).

My first inclination is to rebuild the scene in 3D and map to those objects, but man is it time consuming! This is a neat way to get a really simple result I think. There is another option of painting a depth map by hand of a face, and bump-mapping/displacing a plane to sort of 'fake' the 3D geometry, then couple it with this idea for _slight_ 3D rotation effects too. I'll have to play with it a bit and see if it's worth mentioning.

(Here's a quick test I ran the other day of doing this):

As always, I'm happy if anything I write is helpful to someone!

The video is blank. At least, that's what I'm getting.

I noticed that too. Try refreshing a couple of times (it did show up on refresh - no idea whats going on).

That's pretty cool. I might have to look into doing something like this for my advertising.

Animated gif of the video, in case youtube is still being wonky... (sorry it's so slow - tough to get framerate just right in a gif...)