I’ve found a few resources that talk about this “infinite zooming” effect and I’m really intrigued by the illusion it creates. I’m also wondering how it’s done.
From what I’m reading here, one of the requirements for this type of effect is that the “center of base image must have similar colors as borders.”
That’s interesting, and it makes me think that this can be achieved with many types of images, even 360 degree panoramic images.
So I’m asking the community about what it thinks, and inviting speculation about how this is achieved. Furthermore: can anyone conceive of ways in which this might be accomplished in UE4?
I’m so inspired by this effect and really wondering how it can be incorporated into a gaming scenario.
The easiest way would be creating a tiling environment and moving a camera through it. You could even have the player walk through a forever repeating scene, like Mario 64 with those stairs.
Thanks for the info, ZacD! If you’ll pardon my n00b-ness, can you go into more detail about what you mean by creating a tiling environment? I’m not sure what that means or how I might go about doing that, or what the result of that would be.
Here’s it done on a very small scale, skip to 4:30 if my link doesn’t go to that time. Basically you just need the environment to repeat over and over again, which is pretty simple to do, just duplicate the scene so it repeats, you can also teleport the player seamlessly back to any place the scene tiles so you don’t have to duplicate the scene hundreds of times, or to make it seem like they walked forever but never went anywhere. Tricks like this are also done in Antichamber to create impossible situations like never ending staircases that you can go up or down, hallways that should self intersect but don’t, a doughnut shaped room that’s starting location looks different every time you complete a lap, etc. You could also tile the scene in multiple directions, depending on your exact goals and needs.
I made something like this in After Effects right after watching Limitless. The trick is to make a few shots with a camera that traverses along a straight path/spline.
Then follow these steps:
Put the first shot fullscreen
Layer the second shot above it, scale it down and move it into place so it sits right where it belongs relative to the first shot
‘Anchor’ the shot to the first one by making it a child object of it (so when you scale the first shot, all the childs scale with it)
apply a layer mask to blend the edges in a bit, if it doesn’t fit completely
if you still have shots left, go to step 2
With everything set up, you only have to scale the parent object up over time and you have a simple solution for it. You could apply a few effects and stretching the edges of the screen or something like this to make it more convincing.
In UE4 that should work the same way. Make a blueprint with a few plane meshes, layer the planes on top of each other, scaled and translated into place and just scale the blueprint up.
Edit: found a after effects tutorialfor something like this that should convey the basics behind this:
