2023

Perfect looping gifs utilizing the technique of color cycling.

With the idea of a densly packed scene filled with trains, smoke, and environmental effects, I prompted DALL-E 3 to generate my scenes. Hundreds of iterations later, I have a collection of choice, black and white base images suitable for color cycling.

I did the first round of color cycling using the raw images and a custom tool I built for generating perfect looping GIFs.

For my second round of color cycling, I created a custom photoshop script to generate the color cycling frames. This allowed me to iterate on the color cycling much faster, and with more control over the final result.

I then processed the base image through an AI-powered depth map generator to create a 3D scene in Blender. I then used custom lighting to augment the base image.

In blender I apply a new material that combines both the natural lighting and a customizable 3D vector to ensure the color cycling is applied in a consistent direction.

Finally, I use after effects to compose the original static shadows on top of the color cycling animation.