Optical Illusions Competition

Browsing in a charity shop today I picked up a great fine art book about various artists like escher, Dali and others who twist our brains with a distorted version of reality. As my efforts often look like a distorted version of reality unintentionally, I thought I would try to model something and do an “optical illusion” render.

So here is my first effort. Still lots I could do to improve it. I then thought that maybe lots of you Blender users maybe have renders which play with perception of 3D or fancy having a go as a challenge… So lets see them. The prize for the winner of this competition will be the knowledge that you have managed to reach into the brains of other blender users and twist their perception of reality.
Winner by general acclaim ?


Interesting contest.
There are actually several optical illusion types. I can create the spiral effect easily that looks like it’s spinning if you stare at it for a long time. There is also another type where the scene/object can be looked at from 2 different ways. Or is this an angle illusion where only a certain angle works?

It would be nice to see what you can do dancreator. I tried the spinning sprials effect tonight but it dodnt come out quite the way I was wantng so I didnt post it here and put it in my sketchbook instead. Anyway get rendering and post something - its bound to be better than my efforts !

I know what you mean about angle illusion. The impossible triangle I posted above is based on that trick.

Strictly this isnt just for spirals and angle type optical illusions. Im hoping folk might post up renders that generally play with our perception. From Dali to Escher and anything in between !

Took me a couple minutes, but I think this is the spiral you’re thinking of…not that hard if you know a trick :slight_smile:


Nice one vwet effective. Can you do more with it though? What about some tonal or texture variation ?

As there havent been any more posts Ill post another one Ive just done. The materials are all very basic as is the render which is BI. The illusion still works but with some work on materials the overall image it could no doubt be miles better.


Actually looking at it again I think a less wide angle lens would have been better. The upright posts area actually parallel and straight up but look distorted because of the lens. I think this maybe distracts from the effect.

Edit: This image was done entirely as a direct render using geometry for the effect - no postprocessing.

A year ago I had this effect using some tricks that some users had posted on GimpChat: