Recursive images are those images in which an element repeats itself “infinitely” on an image. With the power of 3D it is relatively easy to achieve this effect, reusing renders as image maps for a texture and then re-rendering.
The scene
The scene can be anything: we just need a canvas of sorts in which we can paste the image we will recycle. It is important that our canvas has the same proportions as the camera window which we will render.
There is a square paper on the pinboard, and the image is also square (By the way, this was made as an avatar for Pinterest) so the object and the render will match perfectly.
We copy this render and paste it as an image map for the texture we have on the paper.
The camera window should look like this in shaded mode.
When re-rendering we will get the following image.
This image we copy and paste again as an image map.
Then we re-render and we should get something like this:
We repeat the process several times until the original blank image is well nigh invisible. In this case it took 8 iterations.
That’s it. With a little patience and a lot of rendering we can do interesting things.
In this example, the piece of paper is slightly rotated, to make the repetitions a bit more interesting creating a spiral pattern.
Please share what you do with this. I’d love to see the results.
