Yesterday I noticed this impossible triangle from Maxpath on Blend Swap: http://www.blendswap.com/blends/view/74917 I didn’t download the blend but started playing around with the basic idea and ended up with this:
Rendered in cycles. The trick part was positioning everything so that the impossible shadows didn’t intersect the objects and show how the trick is done.
I can easily post another render from a different point of view that breaks the illusion but I’ve put the .blend for this here on Blend Swap that way you can explore and break the illusion
If you want to really bend brains you could animate it slowly rotating - but each frame would actually be a new object, modeled to preserve the illusion from that angle!
Thanks for the comments, it’s always interesting to hear what people think.
I experimented with different ground planes, a uniform colour was good for showing off the shadows but looked flat and was oddly more distracting than one with a bit of texture. If I used anything with with stripes, checkers or grids of any kind I found I was being forced to line all the objects up exactly with the ground pattern So the random circles it was.
An animation is an interesting idea; any rotation other than perpendicular to the camera would break the illusion although it may be possible to have the triangles slide through each other in an impossible way I will need to think about that. No promises.
Feel free to use it as a background, desktop or what ever. The .blend file is on Blend Swap and is CC0 there’s a link in my previous post.
I’ve liked the work of M C Escher for as long as I can remember I started another scene last night, got the illusion working, still need to turn that into a finished scene. I may even do an animation. I’ve got a couple of other ideas, not sure if they will come to anything or not. I had been keeping away from Escher references so I wouldn’t be influenced too much by his style. Thanks for posting the links they are always good to have around.