French Electro Box

Posted by on May 8, 2011 in Lumitone, Stereoscopy, Twinklebox | No Comments
Making stereoscopic French electrophonic Twinklebox.

Using a bespoke version Anaglyph Previewer made by Martin Dufour. It’s been modified by Martin to work with a specific stereoscopic camera rig I made a couple of years ago before one was implemented into the 2011 version of 3ds Max. I’m still running on the 2010 version so my old camera rig is coming in useful again. Unlike Maya, 3ds Max doesn’t have stereoscopic viewports yet, so being able to preview using Anaglyph previewer is incredibly useful. Due to the restrictions within Max it can’t play back in realtime so you have to update it manually per frame or render a preview to disk. Nevertheless, it saves a huge amount of guesswork and time.

I’m mainly experimenting with camera movements in this one, and trying to push the boundaries on what’s possible stereoscopically. I’m almost certain that the way the camera is currently animated will make any humans eyes bleed, so the challenge is to soften the stereo effect without losing depth. I’m going to try smoothing the focal plane position so it stays in a similar position in 3d space, just in front of the music box, and allow the particles that will be emitting from Twinkle Box to break the usual convention of passing through the cropping frame whilst in positive space. After some tests this seems to work relatively well. I will have to do a lot of heavy animation of the convergence in post due to all the particles being rendered in After Effects. I’m currently exporting camera positional data in After Effects using RPF’s and then importing positional data for music box using another script called AE_Position_Exporter_v1.0. This means that if I don’t want to use the toe-in technique for rendering the cameras I will have to animate the convergence in After Effects as the only way I can converge the cameras in 3ds Max would be to add a skew modifier to each camera, which wouldn’t carry through in the RPF render data. I’m pretty sure the way I’m doing this will work.

More soon.

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