[3Dmaniac]

Hi,
I've been experimenting with Lightwave's built-in stereoscopic rendering, but I think it lacks control about what will pop out, and what will not. I searched google and found this on daredevilfilms.net:

"Now, the question has become - how do you make a 3-D movie using Poser? The whole concept here is to photograph your subject from two perspectives, separated by the distance between your eyes (approx 2 1/2 inches). To do this, I put a reference object in the scene (namely a simple ball) and tell the camera to always Point At it. Where the ball is positioned will be the screen plane of the shot - anything coming between the ball and the camera will appear to come out of the screen, anything that falls behind it will appear to receed into the screen. The ball is hidden in the final render by simply turning it off. The final render of this shot becomes the Left Eye view. Then, I rotate the camera on the Y axis 2 degrees to the right, and re-render the scene. This is the Right Eye view.

This technique works best when the camera is facing the object straight ahead. When the camera is tilted to look up or down at an object, the Y axis becomes useless, and I have to manually track the camera to approximate the perspective shift. This has resulted in a couple of errors so far, which has resulted in too much parallax (the seperation between the final images when put together in 3-D). Too much parallax, or worse, a misregistered image (when the Right Eye image is slightly higher or lower than the Left Eye) can cause some serious eyestrain in the viewer. So, some of these shots had to be fixed by adjusting the Right Eye image later in post processing. There are two shots so far in this first sequence that will have slight black bars on the side of the frame, because I had to slide the images together to correct a problem with depth (objects that were supposed to be at the screen plane were too far in front of it).

The two final images, if they were rendered without problems, are combined in a program called Stereo Movie Maker to make both an anaglyph and field sequential version of the shot."

How do I do this in Lightwave?


THanks a lot,
Patrick

[Mark]

Possibly the easiest way to do this manually I guess would be to set up a simple rig that approximates the eye setup.

Put two cameras in your scene (CameraLeft and Camera Right). Parent them to a Null object (Null_CameraMove) and set their positions to the same X/Y values and the appropriate separation on the Z axis. These are now your 'eyes'.

Add another Null to the scene (Null_CameraTarget) and make this the target object for both the cameras. Now, simply use the two Null objects to move and focus your cameras.

Make one render out with the left camera, then set the active camera to the right camera and re-render - voila - two separated sequences ready for running through an anaglyph filter....