3D Glasses! I bet your thinking NEAT-0! yeah its sweet I absolutely love the idea of seeing my 2d screen be more 3d. I will show you the concept.

Use those 3d glasses you got with your Coraline DVD on the image to the right and tell me your not excited.

First understand that there is many different ways to use this kind of 3d content. One is Cyan/Red or Green/Red Glasses. What is done is the image is spliting up 2 different color channels. Video displays use an RGB color scale. So if you were wearing Green lenses you would only see Red Blue lights and the same goes for Blue or Red lenses. So if we turn off those color channels and mix images we get the image to the left.

The second way is more popular for movie theaters because it doesn't mess up the colors. Polarizing sunglasses is the new way. One lens polarized horizontal and one polarized verticle. If its polorized horizontally you dont see the horizontal light and vice-versa. This requires 2 projections of light though. Most people dont own projectors. But with the new pico projectors coming out you might be able to make that set up with some of those sunglasses from the theater infront of the projectors to split it up. Neat huh? Anyway now that you know the theory lets jump into making 3d more 3d.

Ok like always I'm going to be using Maya for this. What you need to do is create 2 cameras with aim. I suggest not moving the first one. Just creat 2 then move the second one first then the first one so they are right next to each other just like your eyeballs in your head. The aim point needs to be the same, because when we focus on one object we are actually kind of crosseyed. Otherwise we would look weird like someones really bad made 3d character. They usually look possessed. Anyway now group your camera's together, group you aims together, and then all of it together. This makes it easy to move them around. Now that aim is going to be more or less your focal point. So when your messing around with your depth of field in your camera's that will be what you will want to make work. I usually goto the quad veiw and set 2 of the panels to look thru each of the camera's. Now i'm sure you have some model or something you want to test this out on so lets jump to chase. If you are trying to make a movie make sure you set your renderstats so it renders both cameras. Just use the scroll down window and say add renderable camera. This just cuts out alot of waiting for your render to finish then rendering the other camera. Alright now render whatever it is your going to render. I'm gunna use my brain squid. I made the camera rotate around the legs so we get some pop. Ok on to whatever video editing program you use.

I'm gunna use After Effects. Hopefully whatever program you have you understand you need to be able to turn off color channels. Windows Movie Maker from what I know will not do this. I'm going to be using those Green/Red 3D Glasses. If your using th Cyan/Red do the same thing but switch Green with Blue for the rest of the steps. Now import your footage veiws. Throw one on top of the other. I set the top layers mode to screen so it will look thru and look like a fuzzy bad picture. Next go to Effect/Channel/Set Channel and used this on both of the footage. Then for one of the videos I turned off the Red source and off the Green source on the other footage. This gives you the 3d glasses look you want. The blue channel is fine for being on both. It doesn't matter much anyway in my opinion (the color gets messed up anyway due to the stupid color glasses). But now your ready to Render out your comp! Pretty easy.

This is how your video should look if you followed the steps. This is a pretty cool way to show your work and its not very difficult of a process.

Next I'm gunna walk you thru how you can do this with photoshop images and pictures from your camera. your going to have to shoot these pictures unless your someone who shoot a picture twice and moves only and inch or two. I have great respect for you if you are that guy! Anyway lets get to it. I'm gunna do this with some regular images first. open photoshop and make something awsome. I'm gunna use a couple of my pictures I drew a while back. So now I opened my Stick Shift Alien drawing. I picked this one because i drew it in an extreme perspective. Now I'm hoping you get that its all about the channels. For this drawing I selected only the green channel to edit. I Then selected all of the drawing and did a free transform to the green channel. Shifted the bottom half of the drawing and saved it. It looks like this picture to the left. This is cool because you really can have control over your depth. Now For the photography I'm sure you guessed what we are doing. Now these are just 2 quick pictures on my pool table an inch or 2 moved with a little angle to make some sort of center. Then on one of the pictures I copied what was in the Green Channel and Pasted it in the other photo's Green Channel. This Picture Below is the result of this.

 
I hope this gives some insight on how to do this.

 


The work of Mark Matta
e-mail: freepupet@yahoo.com phone: 586-219-2368