Optimizing Anamorphic Sculptures
4 days ago
- The author developed an application that uses gradient descent to arrange 3D meshes into anamorphic sculptures that form a target silhouette from a specific camera angle.
- A soft rasterizer replaces hard pixel boundaries with a sigmoid function to enable differentiable rendering and error backpropagation during optimization.
- The loss function combines four components: intersection over union, spill penalty (pixels outside target), outline quality using total variation, and collision penalty between meshes.
- The optimization can be extended to multiple views by placing cameras at a 90-degree angle and using harmonic mean loss to balance the two target images.
- Future exploration includes more components, robustness at near-vantage angles, and better use of complementary views.