affinity photo 2.5D: "moving" pictures

[Kasper-V]

I've been experimenting (playing around, mucking about) with a concept called 2.5D --"two and a half dimensions". I've seen it on TV programmes and historical presentation videos, and finally I've got around to trying it myself. I've had one or two false starts with images that are too complex (mainly for my patience, although my cutting-out skills have been challenged), but here are a few that work pretty well, I think. The first one is actually the first one I made, and was a bit ambitious. The last two are from a photo that allows for a drone's-eye-view approach. The photos were split into layers in AP, with the in-painting brush and the clone stamp used to remove things and add stuff around the edges where I needed to fill in gaps between layers. Each layer was saved as a separate png (to preserve transparency), and I used Serif MoviePlus X6 to put the whole thing back together and add motion. (I'm going to miss MP! I shall have a long search to find anything as versatile for a reasonable price.)
 

This is Stowe Gardens in Buckinghamshire, if you're wondering. Capability Brown's finest.

 

The poet Tennyson & his family at their home on the Isle of Wight. (Just down the road from my home!) If pioneer photographer Oscar Rejlander had had a zoom lens ...

 

Walsall, 1900. Early drone footage!

 

Same photo, different treatment. This photo was ideal, having so many layers of rooftops -- five in all, although I could have stretched it to six or seven.

[Aammppaa]

Fun stuff.

 

Perhaps try one with some blurring as the layers become distant, or even some mist / haze depending upon the subject matter.

 

You could even pull focus between foreground and background

[Kasper-V]

9 minutes ago, Aammppaa said:

You could even pull focus between foreground and background

Now there's a thought ... I'll give that some thought. 

[MartinB78]

I know this under the name cameramapping. Here is a nice Blender-tutorial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B9r9tKX5olY

Affinity Photos Impaint and mask refinment functions should be really helpful for creating the textures.

[GarryP]

Great stuff. (I prefer the black and white ones.)
Reminds me of something I saw a while back that blew my mind: https://youtu.be/VQfgtUw4Vtc
I'm looking forward to seeing more of this kind of thing.

[Kasper-V]

17 hours ago, Kasper-V said:

Now there's a thought ... I'll give that some thought. 

What was I thinking? That's incoherent even by my standards! I can't have been thinking at all ...

[Kasper-V]

Martin, Garry: thanks for the links. Camera mapping is the ambitious big brother of what I've been doing. blender looks awesome (as the youngster say) -- I shall have to get into to. Garry, the technique that guy uses is much the same as mine, but with "bendy" animation added.I have a not-very-user-friendly piece of software called Anime Studio which dose bone rigging, which is a similar effect. So far I've been doing this manually, which is long-winded -- but it's fun making up and learning new skills from scratch. Now I'm retired, I don't know how I'm going to find time to fit all this stuff in!

[GarryP]

I remember seeing a video about doing something similar in Blender a while back.
The video has gone from my YouTube history and my memory is fuzzy but the process was something like:
* importing images as planes (settings change needed to allow this);
* convert the plane to a mesh;
* manipulate the nodes on the mesh.
I tried it myself for a little while but it was quite a labour-intensive process so I gave up in the end, but it looked interesting.
(This video https://youtu.be/x1N4rAKvwts has some similar advice but it's more "intense" than the video I was thinking about and I haven't tried it myself yet.)