Creating Holographic Scenes with Diorama

Requirements

Looking Glass Bridge

Download

Introduction

In this tutorial, we'll go over editing holographic Portrait Mode images and composing stylized 3D scenes with Diorama. With Diorama, you can import Portrait Mode photos (or side by side RGB-D images) and make adjustments to its focus, depthiness, lighting and even add vibrant giphys and backgrounds gifs. You've never seen software like this before — now you can capture 3D and edit in 3D in ways you never imagined.

Congratulations, pioneer. You are one of the first human beings to edit and customize holographic photos in 3D.

Warning: you will have a great time.

1. Choosing your photo

💡Quick tip - If you don't have an iPhone or RGB-D image handy, use the example photos in Diorama's library to follow along with this tutorial. You can always use your 2D to 3D converter to convert any 2D image to an RGB-D image here.

When you open up Diorama for the first time, you'll automatically start in the tab "Choose Picture".

Hit the + icon to import an iPhone or RGB-D photo from your desktop. Whenever you select a photo in this library, it will automatically appear in your holographic scene.

Frame your photo

To the right of Diorama's UI window, you'll see instructions for how to frame the photo appearing in your display, as well as options for photo adjustment.

Let's play around in the display with our cursor for a moment. If you select the photo in your Looking Glass, you'll be able to

  • scale by clicking and dragging the diagonal arrow box
  • drag it forward and backward in Z depth with the vertical arrow box (functionally the same as adjusting Focus)
  • and simply drag its position by clicking anywhere inside the dotted box line.

2. Adding a background

One of the wonders of Diorama is that it is connected to the wonderful wide array of Giphy stickers and images for you to use. One might say it is Powered by Giphy. Let's spice up our scene by adding a background image.

Select Choose Background near the top left of the screen. You can type in keywords you want to explore to use as your background gif, or just go with the default search. Cycle through a choose your favorite.

3. Fun with stickers!

Select the Add Sticker panel and type whatever your heart's desire is in the search bar. Clicking on a sticker immediately drops it in the scene. To delete a sticker, simply select it in the display and click the trash icon that appears at the bottom left of the Looking Glass.

Add Word Art works the exact same way except for the gifs are comprised of — you guessed — only word art.

*Diorama 1.1 update: we added the ability to have custom word art in addition to all the fun things you can find on Giphy!

Now that we have a fun scene going, let's move on to...

4. Lighting and effects

This is where all the good stuff happens. Just kidding the good stuff is always happening. But seriously, being able to control and adjust the lighting in Diorama is one of it's greatest magical powers and you'll understand why if you keep reading.

One way to adjust lighting lies in the Effects! panel and the other way lies in the actual holographic scene. This gives you much more control over the type of lighting you want to have in your scenes.

5. Saving your scene

"Wow, I just made iconic work and I don't want to lose it!" you exclaim to yourself. Well don't you worry — there's Save Scene and Load functionality in Diorama that allows you to save up to 9 scenes you make!

Simply select Save Scene at the top of the UI window once you're happy with your work. A window will appear with 9 slots in which you can save up to 9 scenes (before you'll have to Marie Kondo your Diorama app).

To load that scene again, select Load and find your saved piece. Your scene will appear immediately and exactly how you left it in the Looking Glass.

Selecting New resets the scene completely, don't do that right now!.

6. Recording Your Scene

Hit Record Video on the top right of the window to create a quilt recording of your scene. You'll be saving out a nice 10 second loop of your scene in Diorama.

The folder in which it saves (Documents\Diorama\VideoRecordings) will automatically open up once the process is completed.

Artemis has never looked so excited!

We're always excited to see what you're making!

If you have any questions, please reach out to us! You can reach the team at Looking Glass Factory at developer@lookingglassfactory.com!

Share with us your first Block or quilt recording using Unity, either in the Discord, or by tweeting and tagging @lkgglass

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