Deborah R. Fowler
Autumn Illusion
Posted Aug 14 2019
Update on Jan 11 2020 - added a variation Autumn Sun Illusion
Inspiration REFERENCE by Akiyoshi Kitaoka image found at (https://mymodernmet.com/akiyoshi-kitaoka-optical-illusions) and his website (titled Autumn Color Swamp).
I recreated this pattern in Houdini. On the right is my RESULT.
Continuing with Illusions, this is a good exercise in problem solving and is similar to the Line Illusion. Problem solving is a necessary skill. How would you approach this? I will walk through my approach below.
First, it's important in problem solving to break things into smaller pieces - modularity! This is true for so many things. Looking at the reference, search for the patterns.
The first thing I noted was the illusion has
partial rectangles running 45 degrees. Building this rotated 45
degrees makes it easier. Looking for symmetry as a way to build
smaller pieces I utilized the mirror node. The gif below shows
the sections that were built using lines and copy to points. Two
shapes were used in my version, a droplet like shape and a
capsule. If you look closely, the capsule shape is at the
transition where the "square" inside appears to move.
Stepping thru the process:
The white lines were added by taking the lines that were copied onto and assigning a pscale value and merging them in at zvalue -1. The black values in the final image were from the alpha channel converted to black by saving as a jpg.
To give you more specifics in Houdini, for example here is a node network from the side triangle (blue background) and inner triangle (grey background):
The images below include the node network of the shape and a view of the overall network. The latter gives little information but is a good reminder to keep your networks neat and tidy with stickies, network, boxes, object merge (see overview best practices).
