Perry Rylance

Personal & Professional blog

Impossible Shapes

This demo was conceived as a background for a potential portfolio. It never ended up being used for this purpose, but I’m still quite proud of the achievement.

I’ve always been a huge fan of surreal and abstract art, especially where mathematical and geometrical tricks are employed, such as in many of Escher‘s works.

I started with some of the classic shapes such as the Impossible Cube and tried various methods of my own to get this to look good, before finally figuring out how to do this in a pixel perfect manner using extrusion and projection to make absolutely perfect cuts to the shapes based on the position of the camera viewing the object.

The way these illusions work can quickly be revealed by simply rotating the shape, which you can do using the mouse or touch in these demos.

I used Autodesk software to author the models, they are rendered on the web using the THREE.js library.