Making objects appear in front of screen (stereoscopic)

#1

Hi all.
I’m trying to get a hold on doing stereo compositing, but one thing that’s bugging me is how to get objects appear “in front of the screen” (or getting the “Plane of Convergence” in front of the Screen Plane).

I’m working in After Effects CS5 with red-cyan glasses using this technique:
http://www.svoigt.net/index.php/tutorials/22-stereoscopic-3d/29-anaglyph-color-correction-
I know that AE has got its own stereo tools now, but this should work fine for me as well.
Preiewing is on a 24-inch monitor 2 meters away.

I have tried to compose a few scenes with pictures found online, but no matter how i set the interaxial and convergence, i cannot get objects to appear in front of the screen. When i ajust interaxial and convergence, it feels like the object in front is simply “flattened” on the screen, while the rest is moving further back.

My test object is centered in the middle of the screen, as i do not want to take on the challenge of floating windows just yet.

What am i doing wrong? There is probably some limits that i should not cross (seems to remember an fxpodcast mentioning a horisontal difference in Left and Right eye for no more than 60px for a 2k image).
http://www.fxguide.com/fxpodcasts/robert-neuman-disney-stereo-tools/

I know there is courses like FXPHD’s “Stereoscopic Production”, but my current budget is close to zero, so buying training is not possible at the moment.

Any guiding, help, suggestions and links will be much appreciated.

Thanks in advance

#2

Hi again.

It seems that i have solved my problem.

The solutions:
1: Reduce the convergence. My cameras were being way to cross-eyed, resulting in eye-pain. Needed to be much more parallel.

2: Make the “pop-out”-object true 3D. I rendered out (from 3ds max) a soda can with a texture, resulting in different parts being visible for each eye. This really helped my brain understanding, that the object was in front of the screen. My old setup was “just” planes in z-space, which didn’t work when things were in front of the screen.

3: Color correction. It seemed that i had a low level of spill-over from the other eye due to bad monitor calibration.

4: Look at a (close-to) full screen monitor image. Having the interface of your application float around seemed to have a negative impact. A border is fine, tons of buttons is distracting.

Hopes this might help somebody else who’s having the same problems :wink:

#3

General rule of thumb:

coming off screen
Right eye = objects shift to the left
Left eye = objects shift to the right

going into the screen
Right eye = objects shift to the right
Left eye = objects shift to the left

If there’s no movement in the object between left and right eye, that means its sitting on the screen space.

#4

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