2D to 3D Conversion - Queen's Freddie Mercury and Brian May at Live Aid

That's Freddie Mercury and Brian May of Queen at Live Aid, back in the 80s. We're gonna try to do a 2d to 3d conversion of that iconic image using Depth Map Automatic Generator 4 (DMAG4), the premier semi-automatic 2d to 3d image converter.

This is the sparse depth map, scribbled in Gimp.

You can create a gradient in DMAG4 with just a starting color and an ending color (in the sparse depth map) but only if what's between the two (in the reference image) doesn't have any color change. For example, for Brian's guitar body, you can't just scribble a depth for the bottom and top because there's quite a bit of color changes between the bottom and top of the guitar body. Recall that in DMAG4, depths propagate only within similar colors. That explains all the gradients in my scribbled sparse depth map. I didn't scribble this sparse depth map in one go. I usually go back and forth between fixing up the sparse depth map, generating the dense depth map with DMAG4, and visualizing the result in Wiggle Maker, the premier 3d wiggle gif creation tool. Another way of doing things is to create a crude dense depth map from a crude sparse depth map, erase the areas that are wrong, scribble some new depth clues in those now transparent areas, and regenerate the dense depth map (iterate on that process until satisfied with the dense depth map).

This is the depth map that DMAG4 generated from my sparse depth map. I think it's good enough for our purposes.

This is the 3d wiggle created with Wiggle Maker.