Gradient Descent Turns Random 3D Meshes into Anamorphic Sculptures

Optimizing Anamorphic Sculptures

Inspired by Jonty Hurwitz's anamorphic sculptures, I built a differentiable renderer that arranges random 3D meshes—cars, pigs, pigeons—so their silhouette forms a target image from one viewpoint. Using a soft rasterizer with annealed sigma, a loss combining IoU, spill, outline, and collision penalties, the system optimizes positions, rotations, and scales. It can even assemble different images for multiple camera angles, like a dog and a rabbit from the same set of objects.