Growth In Stereoscopic?

Growth in stereoscopic? Wouldn't that be interesting...

After creating simple stereoscopic/anaglyph sequences previously (here and here), I decided that the dynamic flowing camera moves that I created for Growth would really take advantage of stereoscopic 3D. These shots are designed to view the cell growth and development from unusual close-up angles, and are animated to 'fly' close to the cell surface.

After speaking to my classmate Mark Haldane (who has previously created anaglyph material) and getting some feedback on previous stereoscopic efforts, I decided I wanted to test how it could look, so started work on setting up a still image.

I tried to enhance the amount of depth created by the stereoscopic camera setup, as there was not enough previously. Because some of my shots had cells moving off the edges of the frame, I wasn't sure how well they would work, but Mark suggested a way I could work around this problem.

Below are two images; the first showing the anaglyph effect applied to the original cell style I was using, and the second showing the effect applied to the new cell style (as a comparison).

With the Masters show opening just over a month away, I have started thinking about what content will form part of my show. Stereoscopic material is something I would really like to exhibit, but this comes secondary to completing Growth and it's 'Making Of' film.

Dependant on my time, I will continue to experiment with anaglyph renders, and hopefully have something worth showing!

Stereoscopic Update

Following on from my early tests of creating stereoscopic content out of Maya (here), I have completed rendering and compositing of my full cell visualisation sequence.

The process of working with a sequence instead of a single frame was not hugely different, and I feel confident that I could apply an anaglyph effect to a scene in the future. Currently, as it is anaglyph, I have been working in grayscale, but moving into colour is something I would like to achieve.

I am planning on meeting with my project supervisor and programme leader, to discuss the possibility of showing stereoscopic material during the Masters show in August. I am not sure if this will be a viable solution,  but it is worth looking into...

Going Stereoscopic

Throughout this week I have been working through some Digital Tutors content, titled "Stereoscopic 3D in Maya" (more information here).

This course has been designed around generating material which can be used to create 3D images and videos (in my case, using the anaglyph method, which is viewable using red/cyan glasses). There was a lot of instruction regarding "safe" 3D which follows an accepted set of rules, and is designed to ensure that the output will not be uncomfortable to view.

Fortunately Maya has had time to develop its stereoscopic toolset before I started using it, making life significantly easier - some helpful features included the ability to adjust interaxial separation and the zero parallax value (which can be visualised using a coloured plane relative to the stereoscopic camera), aswell as showing the 'safe' area for objects to be placed within. There is also a preview mode which allows you to view/playblast anaglyph material before you commit to rendering. The rendering process is also relatively straighforward (and doesnt differ much from normal rendering), as Maya can batch render multiple cameras (centre, left and right).

The Digital Tutors content also gave a good overview of how to combine the left and right images, and colour them appropriately using both Photoshop and After Effects - ensuring that I could apply these techniques to my own work.

After completing the Digital Tutors course, I wanted to experiment with implementing these stereoscopic techniques into my workflow, so I started off with a basic test - a static scene with 5 cubes, randomly rotated and placed at different depths from the camera. The left and right eye renders were composited in Photoshop and can be seen below (don't forget your 3D glasses!);

The next step was to test an animated sequence in After Effects. I created a new scene, with a cube rotating on multiple axes, a sphere moving forwards and backwards (along the Z-axis) and a pyramid rotating on the Y-axis. I chose these shapes and types of movements as it would allow me to see how well each of the different types of motion would work when finished. The completed video can be seen below;

I then chose to add a stereoscopic camera to one of my existing cell visualisation scenes. Unfortunately, when I first rendered this, I realised the cell material was almost black and therefore lost most of it's colour (and therefore depth). I modified the shader to use 50% gray, which worked significantly better. The following 2 images show a still frame taken from my cell visualisation project (the first image is stereoscopic, the second is 'flat' for comparison);

So far, I have found creating anaglyph images mostly straight-forward (thanks to Maya's built in tools which make it much easier). I have learned a huge amount about the different types of stereoscopic 3D, and the rules that should be adhered to. Moving forwards I would definately like to try and apply these techniques to an animated version of the cells growing, although this will require significantly more render time to test... fortunately the render farm is working and I can take advantage of this again!