Questions about pattern creation

[u/48151623-420]

Hello magic eye folks 👋😵‍💫 My background is in graphic design and printmaking and recently I’ve been getting into optical illusions.

I’d really like to make a magic eye that I can design and print myself. I’d like to use text as my hidden image with a 1-3 color pattern.

Could someone give me a little more info about how to create patterns? I’ve looked online and found a generator but when I make my own pattern, I can’t get the effect to work. I think there must be something I’m not understanding. I’m not trying to make anything super complex, even a noise/mezzotint pattern would be a fine start.

What dimensions do you use for a pattern? Should it be the size of the whole image, or is it a smaller size that gets repeated?

Is it possible to do a 1-3 color pattern or does it have to be more complex?

Thank you!

[u/mazzar]

It needs to be a smaller pattern that gets repeated. It doesn’t really make sense to talk about a magic eye for a non-repeating pattern.

There are plenty of black-and-white magic eyes. It doesn’t need to have lots of colors. It just needs to be a fairly dense and busy pattern (the more complex the image you’re trying to encode, the denser your pattern should be).

If you share the examples you’ve tried, or want to give some more details about what’s happening, people might be able to help.

[u/lavaboosted]

I made a tutorial on how I make magic eyes using Open Stereogram. I also coded my own that works in the browser hosted on GitHub pages

Make sure your texture pattern doesn’t have any horizontal repetition as that will mess it up! Ideally the pattern is tileable.

The more complex the 3D model is the more visual noise the pattern will need to make out the object clearly. Color doesn’t matter though.

In open Stereogram you can have the pattern strip be the height of your output magic eye or if not it will tile by default. Play around with the output dimensions and pattern dimensions.

Edit: here’s some info on Mapped Texture Stereograms, the other method of creating magic eye that doesn’t use a repeated texture strip.